


The Last Library

by Jewels (bjewelled)



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alien Technology, Alternate Universe, Gen, M/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 18:20:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6162433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bjewelled/pseuds/Jewels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-series, in the days of Torchwood One. Torchwood London uncovers a mysterious alien artefact and a building full of dead bodies. Imagine their surprise upon finding that Jack Harkness, self-declared head of Torchwood Three, is the only survivor. What happened, and what's a young researcher at London supposed to do to help?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

## I: The Book of the Troublemaker

** 

Most commercial districts, on a weekend, tended towards desertion. At three in the morning on a Sunday, their abandonment was even more complete. The air was still and silent, the world decorated in various shades of sodium-orange as the street lamps cast ghostly shadows on the ground. For the squat building with the words "Asen Industries" spelled out above its glass and chrome entryway, this should have been a normal silent weekend. But on this particular night, anyone watching would have seen three black and unmarked vans screeching into the courtyard in front of the building with a squeal of distressed breaks, before disgorging six men from each, all dressed head to toe in black, complete with breathing masks. Every one of them carried a rifle and looked ready to use it. 

Their entrance was dramatic, but mostly silent. For a few moments the only sound breaking the stillness of the night was heavy footsteps, and the sound of the van engines idling. The team rushed up to the doors that separated Asen Industries from the outside world, and the commander of the unit, a man who those who served with him mostly called 'the Chief' but whose real name was John Mathers, shone his torch through the glass, peering inside. 

Dotted around the lobby, in poses that indicated that they'd simply dropped wherever they happened to be, whether that was sitting on the comfortable waiting chairs, or draped over the reception desk, or waiting for the lifts, were bodies, all of them pale and none of them moving. 

Under his mask, the Chief's mouth flattened into a thin line. They'd known it was bad, but they hadn't quite expected this. "Louis?" he subvocalised, the movements of his throat muscles picked up by the mic pressed against his throat, transmitted to his team as clearly as if he'd spoken aloud. But it was only his team that heard him through their earpieces. No sound was uttered. 

Louis didn't immediately acknowledge him, only raising a hand to press a small disc against the glass. There was a tiny flash of light, easily missed if one wasn't looking for it, and when Louis removed his hand the disc stayed there, attached to the glass. The flash had been the disc, a small probe, burning a hole in the door and extending a microscopic probe through. Louis looked at a small readout screen built into his sleeve as the probe started sending information. 

"Air's clear," he reported, tersely, "The building's locked down, but no other security countermeasures are in place." 

The Chief nodded, and gestured to one of the other team members. "Open it," he ordered. 

It was the work of a few moments and a small line of microexplosives that made mincemeat of the locks, and then the doors were swinging open. There was no sound of an alarm, the security systems were as dead as anything else in the building, and that included its occupants. Louis gave them a quick scan as the team stepped over the bodies, confirming the readings by pressing his fingers to the neck of the woman who had probably been the receptionist, now slumped over a computer screen that was dark and unresponsive. 

"I'm not getting any body heat anywhere in the building," he said, via the subvocal communications. 

The Chief nodded, though the movement was mostly suppressed by the bulky clothing he wore. "Where's the target?" 

Louis tapped his scanner again. He gestured in the appropriate direction. "Top floor," he added. 

The Chief gestured sharply, and the team fell silent once more. They stepped across the dead bodies, ignoring them, as they made their way through the building. 

They encountered no resistance on their way up. The only difficulty they had to contend with was the occasional locked door, easily taken care of through the placing of super-hot microexplosives or a well-placed kick. The only thing they found at first was more bodies, crumpled in various positions, no signs of struggle, injury or pain. It might have been a fast acting gas that killed them, but that was for other people to worry about. The Chief's job was just to make sure that what they came for was here, and that the way was clear and safe. 

They reached the top floor sooner than expected, a long way from the very top of the stairway. But all the other doors beyond what was the sixth floor were boarded up, and there was no sign that they'd been tampered with. They broke through that final door, and knew immediately that they'd found what they were looking for. 

It didn't take long to sweep the area, and then the Chief reached up and tapped his radio, switching carriers. "Artefact secure. Building clear." He gestured to his team to take up guarding positions. "Send in the team." 

Outside, two more vans pulled up. These two, unlike the first team, had a single marking on the side, a stylised T drawn in hexagons. The people who exited were dressed head-to-foot in white protective gear, with matching gloves and filter masks. The only exposed skin was at the eyes, and those were protected by plastic goggles. They each carried one or two heavy black cases, and followed men left at the entrance into the building. Unlike the guards, they weren't as militarily minded, and one or two gasped and muttered in dismay as they caught sight of the bodies. 

"Later," was all Doctor Swan, leader of the Research team, said. She was only distinguishable from the rest of her white-garbed colleagues by the fact that she was overly well-endowed in the bust, which was clearly visible even through the baggy clothing. 

The scientists and researchers that followed her fell into an uncomfortable silence, and they trailed after the security men who led them up through cramped stairways, past bodies that had been unceremoniously dragged out of the way, and all the way up to the reason that they had been brought here. 

The sixth floor, it was easily to see on entrance, had once been the sixth, seventh and eighth floors. But the dividing ceilings separating these had been knocked through to create a cavernous environment, more like a warehouse than an office building. It had clearly been done hastily, with extra steel bracing brought in to shore up a building which had suddenly been deprived of a lot of its supporting structure. There were doors and windows visible higher up on the walls that had been hastily boarded up. 

It was all to make room for what had been given the name of the "Artefact". No one had been told if there was a proper name for it, it was simply that no one else knew what to call it. They'd had very little intelligence to work on when they'd decided to make their move, and it was agreed by all that calling it a 'Thing' lacked gravitas. It was cubic in shape, nearly reaching to the roof of the three stories that had been cleared out, and glowed with rippling neon light. The strangest part was that that light didn't seem to extend beyond the cube. The rest of the room was still pitch dark, only lit up by the torches that the team had brought with them. 

As the research team began to set up their equipment, small power generators and lighting going up quickly and efficiently, one of the researchers, couldn't help but step towards the cube. It was unlike anything he or anyone else he had worked with had ever seen, he was sure. It was... hypnotic... the way the lights danced and swirled, and if he concentrated hard enough, he was sure he could hear something, some alien noise, just out of his range of hearing- 

"Jones!" Doctor Swan's voice, muffled by her face-mask, nevertheless resounded like a whipcrack. 

Ianto Jones drew back sharply, turning away from the Artefact. He hadn't even realised he'd been reaching out, as if to touch it. Doctor Swan eyed him disapprovingly. 

"How about you find an interface unit for whatever they were using for data-processing on this thing?" she said, "And quickly, please. We don't have all night." 

Chastised, Ianto nodded, and hefted his torch. "Yes, Doctor," he said. 

Swan grunted, and turned away. Ianto frowned, and started hunting around. It was a cold room, the heating and plumbing all ripped out to make way for the huge cube, and he could see his breath misting whenever he crossed through the torchlight of one of the security staff. Of all the places he wanted to be at three am, in a cold corporate building surrounded by dead bodies and armed guards wasn't what he would have chosen. 

He'd been quite happily engaged in supervising an overnight experiment with one of the others from the research department, supervision which required them to do nothing more than sit around one of the labs trading bad jokes and coffee-making duties, when Doctor Swan had barged her way in and ordered them to suit up for a field trip. They'd been given no guidance on what to expect, and it was so rare that researchers got out into the field that he only just remembered what gear to pack and where to find the anti-contaminant clothing. 

The only reassurance he had was that Doctor Swan was as clearly in the dark as the rest of the staff that she'd hauled out of bed in the middle of the night. Ianto was starting to think that no one in the Torchwood hierarchy quite knew what they had on their hands, but they knew they had to control it. 

It wasn't something he had to worry about, he told himself. 

He stopped. 

He'd been sweeping his torch from side to side, scanning for anything that looked like a computer access point, when his beam had landed on one of the bodies. The security team that had cleared the way were slowly moving the corpses out of sight, but they'd not gotten to the far side of the cube, where Ianto stood, just yet. He lifted the beam of his torch to look at one of the other bodies. It was wearing, like the other dozen or so bodies that littered the room, a lab coat. Ianto looked back at the body the had caught his eye. 

It was male, and not wearing protective clothing like the others. Instead, he was covered by a long woollen coat, either blue or grey in colour, it was hard to tell. And he... 

... was he moving? 

Ianto crouched down and reached forward to roll the corpse onto it back, grunting slightly at the dead-weight, and was scared almost out of his skin when blue eyes, hazy and unfocused, but definitely _alive_ fixed on his, and he had time to take in the confused and panicky expression before the man lunged upwards, wrapping his hands around Ianto's throat. 

Ianto made a strangled noise and would later think that he would never say a bad word about security again as two officers nearby sprung into action in seconds, yanking the man's hands away from Ianto's throat and pinning him to the ground. Ianto coughed, his pride more injured than his throat; the man's grip had been weak and kittenish. 

The man was looking around, confused, "What... what happened?" he was saying, shaking his head as if to dispel some confusion, and struggled against the grip of the burly security men. 

Ianto looked up. The ruckus had attracted the attention of one of the other researchers. "Get Doctor Swan," he barked. 

The researcher - who it was he wasn't sure - nodded, and ran off. 

Ianto looked back at the man, and realised he should probably do something. He fumbled in the breast pocket of his overalls and retrieved a small penlight. "Can you tell me your name?" he asked, loudly, shining it into the man's eyes. "Can you tell me what happened? 

The man shied away from the light, but not before Ianto could see his pupils reacting normally. "Wha...?" 

Ianto realised that 'what happened' had been the man's own question and, given his confused state, he was probably a little unclear on the issue. He tried to stick to the simpler question. "What's your name?" 

The man stilled somewhat, no longer fighting the security men. "Jack... Harkness..." he said, sounding a little uncertain on the issue. His eyes met Ianto's, and Ianto took a breath, to ask if he was alright, but just when he would have continued questioning, but Doctor Swan arrived, and imperiously tapped him on the shoulder, wordlessly instructing him to move out of the way. 

He stood, standing off to the side, and watched silently as Doctor Swan made her own assessment, punctuated by sharp questions that Harkness didn't seem able to answer. After a moment, she stood, and ordered the security men to take him back to Torchwood Tower. Ianto watching them go, and then realised that Swan was glaring at him. 

"I believe I asked you to look for an access point," she said, sharply, eyes piercing even through the perspex glasses. 

Ianto didn't need telling a third time. He got back to work. 

** 

The interrogation rooms of the London branch of the Torchwood Institute, labelled on its official documentation as "Torchwood One", were buried in the building's underground levels. The theory was that it would be much harder for any prisoners to escape from convoluted underground passageways, and those same corridors would be much easier to seal off in an emergency. The rooms themselves were plain, white, and utterly lacking in any sort of personality. At first glance, there was only a table and three chairs, each bolted to the floor. 

They were designed for to allow others to observe though, and one wall of the room was designed to be transparent from an adjoining area. There were no obvious mirrored windows, like those to be found in American crime television, they looked instead like a plain concrete wall, covered in off-white paint. There was no indication that that an apparently solid wall was anything other than what it looked like. 

But on the other side of that wall was a room filled with computer monitors and screens a plenty, all of them constantly spewing readouts. Sensors inside the cell were trained on the occupant all the time, delivering real time information regarding heart rate, blood pressure, neural activity, displaying it alongside a video field. There were computers set up, constantly humming and chewing through data, and a long desk designed for other observers who simply wanted to watch the prisoner squirm. 

Ianto sat along that desk, which was pressed up against the fake wall, along with two other researchers, and two members of the upper echelons that he dimly recognised enough to know that their presence was bad news. He hadn't said anything to them on their entrance as they sat down next to him at the long observation desk, only fixed his attention on the laptop he'd brought down and set up to piggyback on the video and bioscan feeds. 

Doctor Swan had given him the task no one else wanted, which was to come down and 'take notes', which essentially meant writing down everything that happened in addition to all the logged data. There would be no difference between his notes and the computer files - it was a duplication of effort - but the official reason was that if there was anything that influenced the Human mind and not machinery (or the other way around) it would show up by the two reports being different. 

In all the time that Ianto had worked in Research, that had never happened, and so it was a boring, thankless task that no one wanted and that he could, by this point in time, do in his sleep. 

There were three people inside, two interrogators, their bioscans, also picked up by the sensors, scrolling by on a small monitor, just out of Ianto's immediate line of sight, and the man they'd recovered from the Asen building, Harkness, he'd said his name was. He was wearing a thin hospital gown, but it didn't grant him the uncomfortable, small appearance that most people gained on donning it. In fact, he was looking rather relaxed. 

"What were you doing in the Asen Industries building?" One of the questioners, a woman whose name Ianto didn't know, asked the question. Her colleague sat next to her, taking notes with a pencil and a studious expression. 

"You know," Harkness said, with a smile that could only be described as 'blinding'. "I'm about as averse to taking my clothes off as the next free spirit, but you could at least turn up the heat." 

American. Ianto hadn't noticed that before. His fingers tapped out his notes, writing out what he saw, what he heard, the process so automatic he only gave it half his attention. 

The woman didn't seem perturbed at the lack of an answer. "What were you doing in the Asen Industries building?" she repeated. 

"After work sex with the CEO," Harkness said, and gave his interrogator a distinct _leer_. "Blonde bombshell with legs up to here. Bit like you. Only with a personality." 

A small laugh, more of a snicker, escaped Ianto's lips before he could stop himself. One of the senior execs glanced at him, and he quickly focused his attention on his laptop screen. 

The woman seemed to realised the wisdom of changing tacks. "You were found in a room with an artefact of obviously alien origin, surrounded by dead bodies," she said, flatly, "You consider that an appropriate venue for a romantic liaison?" 

"You'd be surprised at what I consider appropriate," Harkness said. 

"Why were you at the Asen building?" The woman said, again. "How did you find out about the artefact?" 

Harkness abruptly looked tired. Ianto realised that the man had probably hadn't had any rest since he was dragged out of the building over a day earlier. Ianto at least had slept a little Sunday night, after spending the whole day picking through what what left of the building with the rest of the research team. Everyone else was back in the labs, combing through the data, while Ianto was here, playing typist. He wondered if Harkness had managed to get any sleep at all. 

"I don't..." He broke off, looking away, towards the wall behind which the observation team sat. Harkness unknowingly made eye contact with Ianto, and he shivered, trying to mask the motion as discomfort from the air conditioning system. He really did have the most remarkably piercing eyes. "Was there really no one else alive?" 

"You were the only survivor," the woman confirmed. She leant forward, hands down on the table, her body language screaming "openness". "Why don't you tell us what happened? Tell us how you found out about the artefact." 

Harkness's expression locked up tightly again. "I don't have to answer any of your questions," he said, firmly, "Torchwood One's nothing but trouble." 

"You work for us," the woman said, convincingly. "You _do_ have to answer." 

Ianto, surprised, stopped typing. He'd not realised that Harkness was a Torchwood employee. From one of the other branches, maybe? He'd certainly never seen him about Torchwood Tower, not that that was surprising, given the number of people that worked in the building. 

What had someone from Torchwood been doing inside that building? Asen hadn't been one of the Institute's shell companies, as far as he knew, and had been a perfectly legitimate research outfit in its own right. He didn't know much beyond what he'd heard in the break rooms, as people gossiped madly about the new investigation, but it had been a technology company whose biggest product until now had been a new type of microprocessor for putting inside talking dolls. 

And yet Asen had managed to strip out half its building to accommodate an apparently alien piece of technology. Ianto frowned. Something wasn't adding up. He wasn't supposed to sit there thinking about the situation, only take notes, but he couldn't stop himself from wondering about the mystery of it all. 

"No," Harkness folded his arms, and smirked. "I don't." 

There was a gusty sigh from one of the execs, a balding man with a distinct pudginess about his middle. "Jack fucking Harkness," he said, heatedly, to his companion, a thin man with even less hair than he had. "Thorn in our side for years. Why haven't we got rid of him yet?" 

Ianto pretended not to hear. In Torchwood it was best to pretend that you didn't notice that sort of conversation between very senior people. 

The other man offered up an unreadable look. "Her Majesty's very fond of him," he said, "Something about the Corgis." 

Inside the interrogation room, the woman sat back, and smiled tightly. "What," she said, enunciating every word clearly and precisely, "Were you doing in the Asen Industries building?" 

** 

Ianto wandered along the corridors of the fifth floor, rolling his neck from side to side, hearing the bones pop and crack. He'd spent all day, on and off, hunched over a keyboard, typing, and he was glad of the reprieve. The interrogators had finally called an end to Harkness's questioning, no further along than when they'd started. They'd spent all day asking the same questions over and over, to which Harkness responded to with increasing lasciviousness. He'd hit on his female interrogator, then his male one, and then suggested a threesome, then offered an open invitation to anyone in the observation room to join in, proving that he knew exactly that he was being watched. 

The mental images had meant that Ianto's typing went to hell for several minutes, and he'd have to rewrite his notes later. In fact, that was what he'd have to spend the evening doing. He sighed, and reached into the pocket of his lab coat, the one he always wore around the Tower. It was the easiest way to identify what level of the hierarchy you were in. If you weren't a manager, you were permanently wearing a lab-coat, even if you didn't work with anything that required you to protect your clothing. Ianto's lab coat was plain, unadorned by coloured piping, as the specialists were. Just another one of the faceless masses. 

Ianto privately thought that the reason behind the dress code was because someone in Personnel had a white-coat fetish, and wondered if it would help getting his timesheets processed faster if he turned up in the office one day wearing nothing _but_ a lab coat. Lisa, doubtless, wouldn't approve. 

Thinking of Lisa... 

He pulled his mobile out of his pocket, and thumbed through the contacts until he found Lisa's name. He leant against the wall as it rang. She'd be at home, he knew, her day having finished hours earlier. 

"'lo." She sounded cheerful, if a little out of breath. 

"It's Ianto," he said, unnecessarily. His name had doubtlessly come up on her phone as soon as he'd rung. 

"Hello, babe. Still at work?" 

"Unfortunately," he said, glancing down the hallway. Making personal calls during work hours wasn't forbidden, as such, but it wasn't a good idea to get caught doing it. "Shouldn't be more than another couple of hours, though." 

"Oh," Lisa said, breezily, "Don't hurry on my account." 

"You're not having an affair and trying to keep me out of the house," he said, mock-threateningly, "Are you?" 

Lisa laughed. Her voice, coming down the phoneline, made him feel as warm as if she were standing in the room with him. He always felt just that little bit happier in her presence, even if it was only an electronic version of it. "Oh no, no. And if I were, I'd just wait until you were off on some late night experiment. No. I'm cleaning." 

He blinked. "The house was spotless when I left this morning. What did you do?" 

"Nothing!" She protested, though she sounded nervous. "I just thought it could be cleaner." 

That sounded somehow ominous. "Lisa..." he started. 

"You should get back to work. Doctor Swan, isn't it? Total bitch that one. Work hard, my dear. I'll see you later." And with a click, the call ended. 

He eyed the phone, but realised that if Lisa really was up to something, there was hardly anything to be done now, while he was stuck here in the Docklands and a fair distance from Lisa. He scowled and put his phone away, reaching for the memory card with the notes he'd been making all day. With luck he could get it done quickly and then be home before midnight for once. 

He rummaged around his pockets, both his lab coat, and his trousers, and then swore profusely. Somehow he'd managed to go and leave the files back in the interrogation centre. 

"Well done that man," he muttered to himself, as he stomped off towards the lifts, swiping his card viciously in the security scanner, as if to impress upon the device how unhappy he was about having to make the return trip. On the other hand, the alternative was explaining to Doctor Swan why he'd left research materials just 'lying around'. 

The observation room was empty when he arrived back, the researchers and observers having long since left. He was expecting the interrogation room to be equally abandoned, but he realised, as he crossed over to where he'd left his laptop, about to retrieve the memory card from where he'd forgotten to unplug it, that Harkness was, in fact, still sitting in the interrogation room, this time on his own. 

Ianto hesitated, wondering whether the man had simply been forgotten, and if he should inform one of the guards, but then he realised that the man was sitting calmly, staring at the door. He was waiting for something. 

Without quite understanding why, Ianto sat down in the chair he'd been using all day to wait as well. He'd been staring at the man's face all day, via video screens, with occasional glances at the transparent wall, but he hadn't really sat down and examined him. He looked every inch the square-jawed American hero, and Ianto wondered how an American wound up working for such a British-centric Institute. He didn't have the sedentary look of the high ranking execs that frequented the Tower. He looked like a man who was active, and the watchful glint in his eyes was one that Ianto had seen mirrored in the faces of a lot of the field ops, the one who'd been around the longest and gone on the most missions. 

He looked at Harkness's hands, where they were resting lightly, palms down on the table and slightly curved so that only the heel of the palm and the fingertips touched the surface. He could see the index finger of the left had absently rubbing the clear plastic surface, and Ianto wondered for a moment whether, if he was an active field agent of some description, his hands had the gun callouses that Lisa had complained about developing, the inevitable result of handling weaponry day in and day out. He imagined the gentle abrasiveness, how it would feel against his own skin- 

The door to the interrogation room opened with a bang, and Ianto jumped, pathetically grateful for the interruption from his own thoughts. Fantasising about prisoners now? Maybe he ought to check the rosters and see how much time off he was due. 

Harkness hadn't flinched as the door opened, and offered the intruder a sunny smile. "Ah, Yvonne, how nice to see you again." 

Ianto held his breath. Yvonne Hartman, Director of Torchwood London and universally feared by her staff and Whitehall (something which was only made worse by the way she went out of her way to remember everyone's names and exactly what they did at Torchwood), was standing in a pristine business suit, as if it wasn't eight at night, a smile on her face that could only be described as brittle. 

Ianto swallowed convulsively. If Hartman caught him watching the prisoner unsupervised, when he was clearly supposed to be elsewhere, and when she had obviously thought he was alone, he'd be lucky if he only vanished into one of the bioresearch facilities. Torchwood was very unforgiving of betrayal. 

He should leave. He should leave right now. 

He stayed. 

"Jack," she said, and took a seat opposite him. She laced her fingers together in front of her. "I hope you're being treated well." 

Harkness shrugged, the motion causing the hospital gown to flap about. "I could murder a decent cup of coffee. But no one seems to take the time to make coffee properly any more. It's all instant-this and Starbucks-that. True coffee," he said, "Is an art form." 

"I'll put it into our training schemes," Yvonne said, dryly. "It's nice to see you've retained your sense of humour." 

"And it's unpleasant to find out that your draconian habits of prisoner incarceration haven't changed," Harkness said. His smile, Ianto could see, wasn't as bright as he'd first thought. The skin around Harkness's eyes was tight, and he showed just a few too many teeth. 

Yvonne spread her hands apologetically. "Come now, Jack. It's standard procedure, you know that." 

"Standard procedure for London," Harkness corrected. 

"Yes, and how are things going out in Cardiff these days?" Yvonne said, "It's you and, what... two other people these days? Three?" 

"Enough for the job," Harkness said. 

Cardiff. Ianto realised with a start that they must be talking about Torchwood Three. The other branches weren't discussed much in Torchwood, the Londoner belief that the capital was the centre of the universe stretching to the people who worked there. Four disappeared, Two was a glorified library, and Three was just some monitoring post that absolutely no one talked about. 

In retrospect, Ianto should have perhaps wondered why there was such an official reluctance to talk about the sister branches. 

"And don't think," Harkness continued, "That just because I'm locked up in here, you can send another assault team in to take the Hub. You think it was bad with just me? You won't stand a chance against my team." 

Ianto frowned. _Another_ assault team? 

"I've no interest in your hole in the ground," Yvonne said, betraying her distaste for the first time in the conversation. "And since you managed to get Her Majesty on your side, that is an official disinterest as well. If you want to sit on the shores of reality and collect the rubbish that washes up, you can. But," she leaned forward, "I'd like you to remember that even if we have not always seen eye-to-eye that we do still both work for Queen and Country, and the Torchwood Institute. Surely we can work together better than we can apart." 

Harkness shook his head, looking amused. 

Yvonne narrowed her eyes. "What were you doing at Asen Industries?" 

Jack leaned forward. "What were your guys doing there?" 

Yvonne looked thoughtful. Finally, she seemed to come to a decision and nodded. "We detected a burst of naderon radiation, the sort of energy one normally associates with protonic fusion." 

Harkness frowned. "Protonic fusion." 

"Yes," Yvonne said, "Which would rather indicate that someone had built and activated a protonic fusion generator, except the people who should have that sort of technology are us. We sent a team. Imagine our surprise when we found a building full of dead bodies, a mysterious alien artefact which is not all that forthcoming about its nature, and a not-so-dead agent." She smiled. "Which is even less forthcoming about it's nature." 

Harkness smirked and dropped his voice into a seductive purr. "Maybe if you just asked the right questions, in the right way..." 

Yvonne tried not to look perturbed, but Ianto, watching carefully unseen, she licked her lips, quickly. From Harkness's satisfied grin, he knew he'd gotten to her as well. 

Ianto wasn't even in the room with him, but the man's charisma, or rather, his utter confidence in his irresistibility was overwhelming. He watched as Harkness leaned forward, reaching forward to touch his fingertips to the back of Yvonne's hands, still carefully laced together. "Surely you've heard some stories," he said, voice now so soft that Ianto had to use the microphones in the interrogation room to listen. "Your predecessor and I, for instance," he chuckled, "She was lovely. I taught her some things that would amaze you, things that would make your toes curl and your breath quicken. Haven't you ever wondered? Here's a Torchwood legend, complete with a reputation that would make your mother blush, willing and... _eager_." 

Yvonne's breath had hitched slightly. Harkness leaned in towards her, and Ianto wondered exactly what he'd do if he was about to be subject to seeing a side of Yvonne he'd never wanted to see, but, a heartbeat before their lips touched, Yvonne drew back sharply, her face flushed, and her eyes flashing angrily. "Your reputation does indeed precede you," she said, icily, and slightly breathless. 

Harkness leaned back in his chair, all traces of seduction gone from his face. Instead, he wore a satisfied smirk. "Of course it would," he said. "I promise it's well earned." 

"No doubt," Yvonne snapped. Ianto thought he'd never seen her quite so unbalanced. She stood, hands pressed against the tabletop. "I'll have someone escort you to secure quarters," she said, and smiled unkindly. "I'm afraid your lack of cooperation means I'll be forced to keep you here for a while. Protocol, you understand." 

Jack Harkness watched her go, and after the door closed, he shook his head, and uttered a short laugh, shaking his head ruefully. There was no way to know what he was thinking, and a few moments later, two guards entered the room. They escorted Harkness out, presumably to the cells that lay even deeper underground than the interrogation room. 

Ianto sat in the silent observation area for several minutes, gathering his thoughts. He ejected the memory card from his laptop, which had contained not only the days recordings, but the exchange of barbs that had just taken place. It took several moments of staring contemplatively at the card before he realised that Harkness had neatly avoided Yvonne's question about what he'd been doing when the Torchwood investigative team had found him, half dead, on the floor in the Asen building. 

It took several more long moments before Ianto could stand up without embarrassing himself. Jack Harkness definitely had an undeniable charisma. 

** 

Later that night, after finally finishing his compliance report for Doctor Swan, Ianto asked Lisa, "Have you ever heard of Jack Harkness?" 

He asked while they were having sex, which was perhaps not the best time to start quizzing her, but it was a thought that had rather been preying on his mind. 

Lisa paused in the attentions she had been lavishing on his chest, and looked at him speculatively. She did not, at least, appear offended at his distraction. "I told you," she said, with a wicked smile that he adored, "No threesomes. Not unless there's tequila involved and it's all about me." 

He couldn't deny the appeal of that thought and was successfully distracted for a few moments, until Lisa straddled him, lowering herself down onto him with a low throated noise and then stilled for a moment, both of them enjoying the sensation. 

"Seriously," he said, "The name's familiar for some reason." 

Lisa looked at him as if to say 'you're thinking about this _now_?' and started to move. "Probably is," she said, as she smirked in satisfaction at eliciting a moan from him. "Captain Jack Harkness is the name of the head of Torchwood Three. Don't tell me you're that isolated up in Research." 

Not just some nameless field agent, but the Commander of Torchwood Three, Yvonne's equal, and her apparent nemesis. And yet, for some reason, he'd been found in a London business with an alien artefact, and was refusing to say what he'd been doing there. 

Ianto would have questioned her further on the matter of the mysterious Jack Harkness and the Cardiff branch but, really, he did have better things to be getting on with. 

** 

Some other poor unfortunate was assigned to do compliance logging on Harkness's interrogation, and Ianto couldn't very well object at being given a reprieve from such an undesirable assignment without causing a certain amount of raised eyebrows. So he commiserated appropriately with his replacement, and went to get his day's assignment from Doctor Swan. He was given the task of decrypting an info-block downloaded from Asen's computer system, and he was rather glad of the task, since he could legitimately claim it was being difficult, and work on something else at his station in the labs. His computer terminal was set towards the window, so there was no chance of anyone looking over his shoulders as he hunched over the keyboards, intent on his self-assigned task. Even Doctor Swan grudgingly admitted that he was being "unusually attentive". 

It took him skipping lunch, but by late in the afternoon, he'd finally come up with something he thought would do the job he wanted. He waited until everyone else had gone home, and the only other people in the tower were the night-time security staff and anyone who was running experiments that required 24 hour supervision. He took a moment to contemplate what it was he was about to do. At the very least it would get him fired, but the more likely result, if he was caught, was being 'disappeared' and never heard from again. The rumours always suggested that being officially 'disappeared' was a fate very much worse than death. 

He could justify this foolishness as simple curiosity, a mysterious puzzle that would simply not leave him alone. But if it really was that simple, it would have been easy to brush off and dismiss from his mind. Chafing under the necessity to always obey the rules would be another good excuse, but then the consequences of his failure to obey the Institute had been impressed upon him from day one. Then he remembered the look on Harkness's face, the one that had been set in place throughout his interrogations, that look of wariness, and slight fear. Something was going on, and Ianto couldn't help but feel that Yvonne wasn't looking in the right place, and Harkness was keen to make sure that continued to be the case. 

Lisa would kill him. It was the last argument he could think of to stop himself. 

No, he decided. Lisa would understand. Although, if she ever found out, she would definitely make him suffer. 

He carefully shut down his console, and headed for the lifts. He felt his palms sweating as he pressed the call button, waiting impatiently for a lift to arrive. When it opened, and he saw that it wasn't empty, he bit back a curse. 

Doctor Miriam Bell looked at him, and smiled vaguely. "Going down, Ianto?" 

There was no way he could refuse, but even if he hadn't been sneaking around, about to sacrifice his career and possibly his life, he still wouldn't have wanted to get into a lift with Miriam Bell. She was the head of the Psi Division, and had been the one to lead him through the exercises that every Torchwood employee was required to participate in, the ones designed to unlock any possible psychic potential. She had been the one to teach him how to shield his mind from subversive influence, or detect when someone was trying to deceive using psychic paper. It had been a short course, and nothing painful had come out of it except a rather uncomfortable awareness of how people liked to take their drinks (Lisa's side effects included the ability to correctly identify anyone's favourite colour, a skill which was of little use except as a party trick), but whenever he saw Miriam, he had the memory of her creeping around inside his brain, like tiny, slippery fingers rifling through his brain. It was an eerie sensation, and he was always paranoid that she was trying to read his mind. 

And if that was the case at that moment, he was completely screwed. 

"Ah yes, please," he said, uneasily, stepping inside. 

Miriam smiled, and pressed the key for the seventh floor. It had been the one he'd been aiming for. He shot her a look that probably showed how freaked out he was feeling, but she just smiled at him again in that way that made him think she was permanently stoned. She leaned back against the wall of the lift, hands in the pockets of her lab coat. Unlike Ianto's plain white affair, it was threaded with green piping, denoting her connection with the medical division. He didn't look at her, but he could feel her eyes burning into the back of his head. 

He fought the urge to scratch his scalp. 

The lift seemed to be crawling, but eventually it stopped, and the door slid open. Ianto started forward, grateful to be escaping, but he was brought to a sudden sharp halt as Miriam's hand lashed out, and grabbed his wrist. She was startlingly strong. "The seeds you plant, the harvester does not know he shall reap." Her smile didn't falter, but, after a moment, she blinked, looked slightly puzzled, and glanced at her hand, still holding his arm tightly. "Sorry," she said, mildly, "Did you say something?" 

Ianto stared at her, wide-eyed. He didn't know whether this was something that he should take seriously, or if Miriam was just trying to mess with him. Either way, he thought, he was just a little bit terrified. "Ah... no," he said, after a long moment. 

"Oh," she let go of his arm. "Must be hearing things. Long day, you know. See you tomorrow, Ianto." The lift doors slid shut, hiding her from view. 

Ianto stared at the closed doors for a long moment. Some days he did rather think he should have listened to his grandfather, and become a banker. Surely there would be less of a chance to be accosted by borderline psychotic co-workers in lifts. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves and turned back to his task. 

The room he was looking for was one that was deliberately hard to locate, although it did take up a large portion of the whole seventh floor. It was innocuously labelled "Hard Storage", and the door was protected by a biometric scanner. The locking system for the Torchwood Tower was supposedly impossible to break. Impossible, of course, unless you happened to have administrative level server access, which Ianto had figured out a way to give himself (with some help from a very pretty young technician who had gone to pieces at the sound of his accent) not long after he'd started working for the Institute. It also required a certain level of coding expertise, but then Torchwood trained its researchers very well. 

He pulled a slim needler probe out of his pocket, exactly the sort the investigative team had used on the Asen computer system, and jammed it into the sensor. The probe would deliver a retinal pattern to the scanner, and convince it that it was attached to a real Human, rather than being dead or fake. It would have all fallen over there, given that the scanner would query the central database for authorisation. But the program that Ianto had slaved over all day provided a database entry that matched the retina print the needler was inputting. The real key lay in the corners that the system cut to work with any speed. If the system examined the retinal pattern and then went through the entire personnel records system looking for matches, it would throw up the fake. He'd been forced to copy an existing retinal pattern from the records (Yvonne Hartman's, since Ianto had felt that a particularly amusing choice), not having any other way to get a scan at short notice, and that scan obviously already existed in the database. But that would take a long time, and the security system would be scanning the entire database several times a second with all the people moving around the building. So instead, the scanner looked at the retina print, and the name with it (in this case: Ann Other) and looked to see if there was an Ann Other in the database with that retinal print. 

As he'd known it would, the system found a match, and unlocked the door. 

He slipped inside silently, and found himself in a room that smelt slightly of sour milk. He grimaced, breathed through his mouth, and walked into the room proper. Stretching off as far as one could see in the poorly lit confines of the room, were shelves upon shelves of files, all neatly stacked and labelled. This was Hard Storage, the place where Torchwood kept documents that were so sensitive they couldn't risk keeping them on the servers for fear of hacking, either from the outside or from employees like Ianto, who wanted more information than Torchwood was willing to provide. Once a week, on a Monday morning, the files were updated, and then the room was left alone for the rest of the week, unless someone desperately needed access to the files. Ianto knew he wouldn't be disturbed. 

He started searching through the shelves. They were arranged the same way as the Torchwood database, the cataloguing system almost identical, and so it didn't take him long at all to find what he was looking for. 

An innocent looking file sat on the shelves, tucked in front of "Harpie, alien". The spine read: "Harkness, Jack". 

Ianto swallowed, and pulled the file down from the shelf, grimacing at the weight of it. He'd not come this far not to take a look through. He sat down on the floor and opened the file. Inside were dozens of neat sheets. There was no point trying to take copies of them and get out before he was found. The security system that allowed Hard Storage to remain secure was twofold. Firstly, all the paper inside was made out of a sort of compressed algae that required a constant nutrient factor in the air to prevent it from drying out and immediately becoming dessicated – that was the smell that Ianto had detected on walking into the room. If he tried to walk out with anything, it would crumble to dust in his hands. The second part of the system, the one that prevented Ianto from even taking photos of the pages, was that everything on them was written in psychic ink. Unlike psychic paper, it didn't change depending on what someone wanted to say, but it was dependant on a Human, or at least something with psychic tendencies in its brain, to see anything at all. To cameras or scanners it would just look blank. 

That was fine. Ianto didn't need to take any files out of the room. He only wanted to read them, to get a handle on exactly who Jack Harkness was, and try and figure out what was bothering Ianto so much about him. 

Four hours later, he finished reading, his eyes burning with fatigue, and his back sending painful spasms all the way up his spine ever time he tried to move. He carefully gathered all the scattered papers together and put them back into their file. He let himself out, an easier affair than getting into the room. He went back upstairs to his lab workstation, and spent the next twenty minutes making sure his clandestine activities were thoroughly erased from the system. 

And once that was finished, and he had nothing else to distract him, Ianto thought about what he'd just read, and contemplated getting very, very drunk. 

** 

The following morning, Ianto turned up to work, having failed to get drunk, unable bring himself to drown his worries in a bottle, and had instead managed to get very little sleep. Thus it was he appeared before Doctor Swan and the research team for the morning briefing looking rumpled and unkempt. It was an unusual look for him, and Swan clearly didn't approve. She frowned at him before she called the meeting to order. 

"Alright," she said as the team settled, quietening them with a sharp gesture. "Presuming you haven't all been sleeping for the last couple of days, you should have something to report." She pointed a finger at one of the other researchers, a man named Hassan, and arched an eyebrow. "Start talking." 

Hassan was an officious little man, who tended to act like he ran the lab. What was especially galling to his colleagues was the fact that his attitude was matched by his competency. "Yes, right," Hassan said, tugging on his jacket in a habitual motion. "Well, the most obvious point is that the cube is separated from our reality by some sort of subspace field. We've been trying to ascertain it's mass, but our readings are skewed. It's clear that the cube has off-set its mass into other dimensions." 

Swan frowned thoughtfully. "By how much?" 

Hassan cleared his throat. "We're still investigating," he said. 

Swan nodded. "So we don't know. Find out." 

Ianto fought the urge to roll his eyes, masking his expression by taking a large gulp of coffee. As if it was that easy. 

"What about the Asen database?" Swan asked, directing her attention to another researcher. "How far along are we with cracking it?" 

"Progress is... slow," Michaela admitted, tugging on one of her plaits nervously. "We've gotten through the first layer of encryption, but there seem to be at least six more layers to hack through before we get any useful data." 

Doctor Swan sighed dramatically. "Wonderful. So when Yvonne Hartman calls me up to her office later and asks about our progress, I can tell her that my research team are apparently a load of nitwits who couldn't find their arses with both hands and a map." 

The mood amongst the assembled researchers was definitely 'sulky'. Ianto hesitated, and glanced around. It seemed no one else was about to speak, so it was a good a time as any to ask. 

"The dead bodies," he started, hesitating when every head in the room suddenly swivelled in his direction, but did his best to ignore it and carry on, "Do we know what happened to them? What killed them, I mean?" 

Doctor Swan shrugged. "I have no idea, and I don't much care anyway. It has no bearing on our investigation." 

That, to Ianto, seemed like an especially stupid point of view. "There was an alien artefact surrounded by a lot of dead bodies," he said, "And we don't think the two are connected." 

Swan sighed impatiently. "Whatever happened hasn't reoccurred. Our own personnel are in no danger. We're interested in the technology and how it works, not what happened to these people." 

"That's not-" _That's not right,_ he wanted to say. Ianto stopped himself. It wasn't right. Not in the slightest. But Swan had no problem with forgetting about all the people who'd died, and pressing her would only bring a lot of trouble down upon his head. He spent the rest of the meeting glaring moodily into his coffee, turning the situation over in his mind. 

Why was Swan so convinced that there was no danger to the Torchwood team now studying the artefact? 

** 

Ianto was on his third coffee break of the morning by eleven o'clock. He genuinely had little reason to hang around the labs. He'd left his terminal chewing through a few code-breaking algorithms, and all he had to do was wait for them to finish. Usually he would have passed the time with the other researchers, helping them out, or perhaps working on one of the personal projects he had on the go. Torchwood was always very willing to encourage independent research, firmly of the opinion that such was the way new and exciting discoveries were made. None of those projects held his interest today, though. He'd stared at the archival indexing solution he'd been working at, on and off, for two months, and then banished it to the electronic ether when it had failed to prove sufficient distraction. 

"Jack bloody Harkness," he heard a female voice, Yvonne's voice, say heatedly. 

He'd been wandering around the third floor, where the canteens and break rooms were located, and the voice had come from just around the corner. He peered around the bend in the hallway, and saw Yvonne glowering at a chocolate vending machine. Next to her stood her PA, looking sympathetic. 

"That man and his team of social rejects manage to be the bane of my existence even while being trapped in the back end of beyond," she continued, and gave the machine a good thump with her palm. The vending machine seemed unimpressed by her temper. "Threatening to get Her Majesty involved indeed." 

She was silent for a long moment, and, eventually her PA tentatively asked, "Uh, is there anything you'd like me to sort out, Yvonne?" 

Yvonne sighed, sharply. She seemed resigned. "Get his clothes back to him, and release him. Then call the Chief and tell him to make sure that Jack Harkness stays the hell away from Asen Industries. I don't want him getting in the way, whatever it is that he happens to be up to. Have him followed." 

Ianto drew back around the corner as the PA nodded and walked away. An idea came to him, and before he could change his mind, he ran off down the hallway, in the direction of Stores. 

** 

Alexis Cole, Yvonne Hartman's personal assistant, was used to being treated as a general dogsbody. He regarded it a compensation for working so closely to the heart of Torchwood. Still, he would rather not have been retrieving a prisoner's personal effects, and discharging said prisoner. It was long, boring, and beneath him, and he had better things to do than hang around in the underground interrogation centre all day. So, all things considered, he was rather grateful when a disinterested looking man came up to him in the corridors and said, 

"Yvonne wants you back upstairs." 

He was grateful, but felt compelled to disagree for appearances sake. "She asked me to sort some things out..." 

"Harkness, right? I'll sort of the paperwork to get rid of him, no worries." The man nodded to the sealed plastic bag in Alexis's hands. "Those the clothes?" 

"Yeah," Alexis handed them over without a second thought. "Thanks, mate" 

"No worries," the man said again, and started heading in the direction of security, swinging the bag with the clothes inside as he walked, apparently absent-mindedly. 

Alexis promptly forgot all about him, and headed back upstairs. 

** 


	2. Chapter 2

## II: The Book of Voices 

** 

Jack Harkness had been having a rotten week so far. 

He'd been killed at least once – and how that had happened was something he was still uncertain on – and then captured by Torchwood London, proving that Yvonne Hartman still hadn't gotten over the time he'd called her a bitch and sent her assault team back to London with a few less memories than when they'd left it. To cap it all of, they'd left him in an unflattering hospital gown for far too long, and it did absolutely nothing for his complexion, and shut him in a cell with nothing to do but count the dots in the ceiling tiles and get dragged away for repeated and fruitless questioning. 

He'd reached eight thousand four hundred and eighty two dots on the ceiling when the door swung open to reveal a pair of black-clad security guards. He sighed and sat up on the uncomfortably thin mattress that called itself a bed and gave them a lopsided smile. "That time again, huh? You know, I never thought I'd get tired of twenty questions-" 

One of the guards had apparently run out of patience. He tossed something straight at Jack. He reflexively reached up to grab it, and discovered that it was in fact the clothes they'd taken off him when he'd come in. He looked up at the guards, suspiciously. 

"You've been released," the man said, "Yvonne's glad to be rid of you, I think." 

"It's my winning personality," Jack said, and wasted no time in quickly pulling on his clothes. It as a bit of a relief after the chill of the cell. It was as he was pulling on his greatcoat, however, that he felt an unfamiliar weight in the pocket, a weight that hadn't been in there before. Glancing at the guards to make sure they weren't looking, he slipped a hand into the pocket, feeling the shape. It was something with keys on it, and a screen, larger than a normal phone, but similar. A smartphone? He didn't dare look, only pulled his hand out of his pocket and smiling winningly at the guards and gesturing to the door. 

"Shall we, gentlemen?" 

Yvonne must have been fairly desperate to get rid of him. The guards escorted him up to the main reception area, handed him back his gun and his mobile phone, and unceremoniously kicked him out on the street. Jack looked up at the edifice of Torchwood Tower and grimaced. London's hospitality hadn't changed much in a hundred years. In fact, he would say that their attitude towards their sister organisations had worsened. Back in the day, Torchwood One operators would have just shot him. These days, they smiled, captured him, and then made noises about having him stabbed in the back. 

The world was nothing like it used to be. 

He waved up at the security cameras, knowing Yvonne would be watching, and walked off, heading for the nearest coffee shop. He desperately needed a caffeine fix. Fortunately, this was London, and it was impossible to walk for more than five minutes in any direction before tripping over a Starbucks. As he walked, he pulled his phone out, and dialled the Hub from memory. 

"Jack?" It was Toshiko Sato who answered, "You're ok! Owen, Suzie, it's Jack!" 

There was the sound of scuffling in the background as the other two presumably scrambled over to Tosh's workstation. 

"Jack," Suzie said, "Thank god. I was starting to think that witch was never going to let you out." 

"That was your doing, I take it," he said, smiling. That was his Suzie. Pretty unafraid to take anything on, consequences be damned. 

"I might have made a few phone calls," she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. "I didn't think they'd get onto you so fast." 

"They were as surprised to see me as I was to see them," Jack said. "Kept demanding to know why I was there. They weren't happy with my lack of an answer." 

"Typical," he heard Owen mutter. "Swan in, take over everything, make our lives nothing but trouble." 

"Torchwood London's nothing but trouble," Suzie supplied, sounding exasperated. 

Jack stuck his hand into his pocket, touching that heavy weight he'd felt before. He lifted it out, and, sure enough, it was a smartphone. There was a number written on a label on the back. It was definitely corporate origin, and no doubt from the Torchwood stockroom. But what was it doing in his pocket? If they were trying to track him, it was a very clumsy way of doing so. Pressing his lips together in thought, he pressed the on button. There was a pause, and the screen lit up. 

There was one message sitting on the system, with no number attached to the sender. He thumbed the keypad to open it. 

_People are dead and TW1 doesn't care,_ it read. _How about you?_

He thought about that for a moment, and started tapping a response even as he spoke down the line to the others. "Tosh, I know it's a tall order, but see if you can get into Asen's systems. I'm pretty sure that they knew much more about whatever this thing is than anyone else." 

"Hmm," Tosh said, "It's going to be hard. They've got a very restrictive system. It's going to be impossible to get in unless you manage to get back inside and plant a relay." She paused. "It would be easier if I came down there and-" 

"No," he said, sharply, raising his head as if to glare at her. Unfortunately, she was on the other side of the country, and he only wound up glaring at a postbox. "I don't want any of you guys near where Torchwood London can get its hands on you." 

"Jack, we're big boys and girls," Owen said, sounding peevish. "We can handle ourselves." 

"Not against London," Jack said firmly, unwilling to debate the point. "Trust me, you don't know these people. I do." 

_Who are you?_ He messaged back in reply. _And what do you know?_

"I don't like that you're out there without any backup," Suzie said. 

The smartphone in his hand beeped, and he looked down to see the new message. _I work in Torchwood London,_ it said, _And I know that something is very wrong here._

"Oh, don't worry," Jack said, eyeing the device thoughtfully. "I think I might just have that covered." 

** 

Twenty minutes later, Jack was on his second cup of coffee, and finally starting to unwind, giving himself space to think about what his next move was going to be. There was no chance that he was actually going to obey Yvonne Hartman and keep out of the Asen situation. The brief glimpse he'd gotten of the alien artefact had convinced him that it was definitely something to be kept out of her hands, although Jack tended to make it a point to thwart London at any opportunity. 

He didn't believe her for a moment when she'd claimed that protonic fusion burst had caught their attention. His wriststrap had recorded no such energy surge, and by its technology, such things were easily detectable. That meant that Yvonne Hartman was lying to him, unsurprisingly. 

Jack rolled the coffee cup between his hands. The logical solution would for him to start at the beginning, and to figure out where exactly things had gone wrong. 

** 

Steve Jacks's head rebounded off the window. Made of toughened glass, it deprived Jack of the satisfaction of seeing it shatter under the impact. Instead, dear Steve was left conscious enough to yell, 

"Jesus, man! You're gonna fucking injure me!" 

Jack grabbed Steve by the scruff of his shirt collar and slammed him face-first into the wall, twisting his right arm painfully behind his back. "That was kinda the idea," he snapped, "And unless you want to spend the rest of the month in an ICU, I suggest you start talking." 

"Fuckin' crazy, man!" 

"Crazy _and_ short on patience." Jack yanked him away from the wall, before slamming him back against the cheap plasterboard surface again. "Now talk!" 

Steve Jacks was, in Toshiko's words, "a complete sleazebag". He was a lawyer, but the sort of lawyer that thought ambulance chasing was a bit high-class. His connections with two-bit criminals were listed on a police record as long as his arm, and several of those names had come up in connection with Asen Industries. Steve Jacks had, in fact, informed Torchwood Cardiff of the suspicious goings on in the London company. They'd been holding certain illegal dealings over him for years, quietly blackmailing him to keep him on as an informant, and Steve had clearly hoped that such a juicy bit of information as Asen getting its grubby paws on alien technology might get them off his back. 

Jack would have been inclined to agree and let matters slide, if said information hadn't led rather directly to his own death. 

"I don't know what to tell you!" Steve whined, "Ow!" 

Jack grit his teeth. "How did Torchwood London find out something was going on at Asen? Because they sure as hell didn't hear it from me!" 

"Maybe they're just better at intelligence gathering than you," Steve said, a nasty note in his voice. "Everyone knows you Americans don't know shit. Fuck!" Jack had taken the opportunity to painfully yank his arm up another inch or so. 

"Care to rephrase that?" 

"You don't know _jack shit_." Steve yelled loudly as Jack dug his fingers into a nerve cluster to make his point. "Ok, ok, fine. Let go of me!" 

Jack frowned, considering. 

"Fuck, where am I going to run off to that you creeps can't find me?" 

Jack harrumphed, and let go, allowing Steve enough room to straighten up and turn around, but not moving away, keeping him pinned in the corner of his shambolic excuse for an office. "Talk," he ordered. 

"I didn't tell them anything," Steve repeated, in a tone definitely describable as 'grumbling'. "I didn't have to." 

Jack frowned. 

Steve shouldered his way past Jack, moving over to the kettle to make himself a coffee with ostensible nonchalance. "Oh sure, I thought, bright idea. What one branch of Torchwood will pay for, you get get two to pay for at twice the price. Not like either of them ever talk to each other now is it?" 

"And here was me thinking you were going to be trying to talk your wait out of my shooting you," Jack snapped. 

Steve looked like he was briefly considering a snarky response, but after a long look at Jack's face, he paled slightly, perhaps realising exactly how serious Jack was about the threat. He fiddled with the old and chipped mugs that sat upside down next to the kettle. "I told them that Asen was messing around with technology that was probably alien. They seemed kinda interested, but the weird thing was that when I told them what it was, a glowy cube, they didn't seem all that surprised." 

Steve hesitated and Jack looked at him with narrow eyes. "What are you not telling me?" he prompted. 

Steve fidgeted for a moment. "They asked me questions about the thing, and the only thing that got them really surprised was when I said how big it was. They seemed to think it was small, really small like 'hold in your hand' small. I told 'em they were wrong, and the next thing I know, they're threatening to send me off to some hole in nowhere if I tell anyone." Steve glowered at the kettle as he flicked it on. 

Jack looked at him speculatively. "Why haven't they thrown you in a hole already?" 

Steve rolled his eyes. "Because I have no real sense of moral responsibility and will sell information to them happily?" He snorted. "I suppose I should be grateful they can't do any weird men-in-black shit and wipe my memory, or I think they'd have done that already." 

Jack shook his head. "Don't worry, there's only one person with amnesia pills. And that's me." 

Steve laughed. "Good one." 

Jack shrugged. "Fine, don't believe me." He folded his arms. "So Torchwood One already knew about the cube," he said. 

"I guess." 

"But they were surprised at it's size." Jack stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. "I suppose if it wasn't what they thought it was, they'd be keen to make a move on the place. They certainly didn't come because the staff of Asen all got killed." 

"That thing killed them?" Steve ran a hand over his head. "Shit. I need to think about getting out of this business." 

Jack frowned. "That's the problem. I'm not sure that it did kill them." 

** 

_How did the Asen staff die?_ he asked his Torchwood One friend. 

It took a few minutes for the response to come. Jack was sitting on one of the many benches that overlooked the Thames. From here, he could look downriver and see Canary Wharf lit up brightly against the dark night's sky. London was a genuine international capital. Even in the middle of the night, it was alive, and busy, and voices drifted from nearby that weren't all speaking in English. Jack wasn't entirely sure he liked it more than Cardiff. There had been a time when a city like London would have been tame by his standards, when the presence of only a single species of a mere few million in number, with no flitters buzzing around the sky, seemed terribly parochial. It just went to show how a person's perception could change, especially if they'd had to go a substantial portion of their life without proper indoor plumbing. 

The smartphone beeped. _Don't you know? You were there too._

His mouth twitched. _The staff were all dead when I got there. I made it up to the cube before I was-_

He looked up at Canary Wharf in the distance and tried to think how to phrase it. 

_-overcome._

Another protracted pause. _The autopsy results haven't been released,_ said the message. _I'm guessing they're not done yet._ And then, _Yvonne Hartman's having you followed._

Jack smiled slightly. _She was. I lost them after the first ten minutes._ He drummed his fingers on the back of the plastic casing. _Who are you?_

_I'd rather not say. I'm not 100% convinced this is secure._

_Then why should I trust you?_ he promptly responded. 

_If you don't want my help, that's fine. It's not like it's very safe for me to be standing in the Tower sending messages to Yvonne's least favourite person in the whole wide world._

_Least favourite, really?_ Jack added a smilie face at the end for effect. 

_I'm starting to see why._

Jack briefly wondered who exactly might be sending him cryptic messages. It was someone high enough up to know Yvonne and who she liked (somehow he doubted she was going around telling every two bit research assistant that he wasn't on her Christmas card list), and someone who'd been present at the Asen Industry building when he was found, or was able to access the reports. Who was head of research these days? Michaels? Swan? It almost certainly wouldn't be them. He didn't think that either of them had forgiven him for stealing the subspace modulator probe that had landed in Gloucester in the name of Torchwood Three. 

He pulled out his mobile phone. "Tosh," he said, when the phone was picked up. "Do me a favour?" He read out the serial number on the casing of the smartphone. "See if you can trace who's sending messages to this thing?" 

He could hear the sounds of rapid typing in the background. "It's heavily encrypted," Tosh said, dubiously, after a few moments had passed, "I'm not sure I'm going to be able to crack this quickly. It looks like a Torchwood London encryption." 

Suzie was apparently eavesdropping. "What's going on?" she asked. 

"Not sure yet," he said, "I'm starting to think that this cube is something that Torchwood's encountered before, or at least London has. Do me a favour and see if you can't find something in the Cardiff archives?" 

Suzie sounded dubious. "Jack, have you seen the archives lately? It looks like no one's been down there to organise them since..." 

"1999, I know." It was one of those things that Jack kept meaning to do, but kept putting off. He'd have assigned one of the others to sort things out before now, but his team seemed to hate filing in a way that Jack himself thought was slightly too personal than was normal. He didn't let them near some of the items in the archives anyway, knowing that they just didn't have the experience with alien technology that would let them identify dangerous things immediately. They were getting there, but weren't quite that knowledgable just yet. 

"They stopped sharing their files with us in 2000," he said, "But see if there's anything in there before that." 

"Bit of a long shot," Suzie said. 

"I know, but it's worth an attempt." 

He put the phone down, slipping it into his coat pocket. He breathed in the cool night air and, in spite of himself, smiled slightly. There was something refreshing about being out and about on his own, investigating without having to worry about anyone else getting in harms way. He would have been lying if he'd told anyone that he wasn't started to feel a little stifled in Cardiff. Between the necessity of taking care of a team, and the ever constant watchfulness and waiting for a certain individual to come back into his life, he'd barely left the Cardiff area in the last four or five years. He hadn't realised how much he'd missed this sort of thing. 

_Does Torchwood have prior knowledge of the cube?_

_I think so. Or that's the impression I get from Doctor Swan. She doesn't seem too interested in anything she's seeing. She acts like it's old news. I don't know for sure._

_Can you find out?_

The pause this time was longer than any of the others. _I'll try,_ was the eventual response. 

Jack nodded to himself. He couldn't ask for anything more at that very moment. Whoever his mysterious little helper was, there was no doubt that simply by communicating with Jack they were putting themselves in danger from Yvonne. He wasn't going to scare them off so soon. 

** 

Ianto Jones was not, if one were honest, a wilfully disobedient man. Most of the infractions of his childhood had involved extenuating circumstances that had gone a long way to ensuring that his public records were a lot less colourful than they might otherwise have been. It gave him a brief frisson of excitement when he took a moment to think about what he was doing (and if he didn't think too hard about the possible consequences). That, and the utter conviction that it was _wrong_ to just ignore what had happened to the Asen staff. 

There was only one thing that could stop him, and she was currently standing in front of him, having stepped into his path the moment he'd ducked out of the labs to conduct his clandestine errands. 

"Ianto," Lisa said, a trepidatious look on her face. "We need to talk." 

"Words to strike fear into the heart of any man," he said, blinking at her. He turned, and started walking towards the lifts, as if she wasn't interrupting anything important. 

"You're probably going to be mad at me for not saying anything earlier," Lisa continued, as Ianto pressed the call button. 

The doors opened, they stepped inside, and Ianto said, "You know, I thought I was joking with that 'affair' remark the other day, but now..." 

"Ianto," Lisa sounded impatient, and she sighed. She fixed her eyes on the inside of the lift doors. "It's my mother." 

"What about her?" he asked, selecting the fourteenth floor on the lift panel. Overtly, it was an innocuous choice: it was the home of the accounting and HR departments. 

"She's coming to visit," Lisa said, quickly. "Tonight." 

"That's why you were cleaning." Ianto stared into space. "Right. We can handle this. We can deal with it maturely." 

"Good," Lisa said, smiling. 

"In an adult fashion." 

"Glad you agree." 

Ianto took a deep breath. "It's the only sensible solution, after all." He turned to her, putting hands on her shoulders. "Well, my darling, it's been fun, but maybe we should start seeing other people." 

He kissed her chastely on the cheek, and exited the lift quickly as the doors opened. 

Lisa's smile collapsed into a scowl, and she held the doors open with her hand. "Ianto-" 

"I'm serious," he said, hands on his hips. "Your mother hates me." 

"She does not _hate_ you." 

"She threatened to castrate me with her pruning shears." 

"She was being hormonal," Lisa said. "She's going through the Change." 

"The Change causes her to imply I'm the illegitimate offspring of a genetic throwback and a sheep, does it?" 

Lisa bit her lip. "Maybe you should..." 

"Have a few late night experiments to occupy me for the next few days?" 

Lisa's shoulders sagged minutely in relief. "Might be a good idea." 

"That way she probably won't walk in on some handsome Welshman having sex with her daughter again." 

Lisa's nose wrinkled as she grinned. "Nah, I sent him off yesterday." 

He leaned forward and kissed her again, properly this time, on the lips. "Don't let her throw out all my stuff." 

Lisa stepped back, letting the door slid shut between them. "No promises," she said, impishly. 

He was left staring at a brushed metal door with the Institute's logo etched onto the surface at eye height, and let out the breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding. He stuck his hand in his labcoat pocket, and felt the smooth contours of the second of the two phones he'd lifted from the repair stores, a reminder of exactly what he'd decided he was doing. 

For a moment, he'd been tempted to tell her everything, to explain exactly what was going on. But even if she agreed with his reasoning, and his actions, she might have wanted to help, and he couldn't let himself risk her life if he got caught. He couldn't even risk her knowing. Better that she could honestly admit to ignorance. 

He sighed, and started wandering through the hallways, smiling politely at the people who passed him in the corridors, until he came to an office he knew to be temporarily abandoned while its owner was on holiday. If he was going to start doing some serious messing around in the Torchwood databases, he didn't want to be caught at his own workstation. 

The office belonged to one of the senior archivists, a man Ianto was well acquainted with. He'd been speaking in longing terms for several weeks now of his approaching leave, and his plans to spend the month lounging around his house in the south of France. Ianto had rolled his eyes and given him a hard time about living the rich man's lifestyle, but now he was grateful that he knew a place with a direct-access terminal that was empty. 

The door was locked, as per protocol when the occupant was absent, but then Ianto had stood here many times, watching the keycode being input. He felt a minor stab of guilt for using the information in such an underhand fashion, but told himself that if he hadn't stopped before now, it was the wrong time to suddenly be getting cold feet. 

A quick glance around for anyone watching, four quick taps, and he was in the room, the lights flickering on automatically as they sensed movement. 

It was a slightly crowded office, in spite of a relatively luxurious size. Files and folders were stacked on every spare bit of desk space, on the extra chairs, on the floor, while the shelves were crowded to overflowing with books, spiral bound reports, and random pieces of paper. There were some folders with 'urgent attention required' written on them in large red letters that had a layer of dust on them, and had clearly remained undisturbed since they'd arrived. On top of a stack of files near the window, there was a half-dead spider plant that was slowly shrivelling, unwatered, in the sterile and air-conditioned air of the Tower. 

He pinched a leaf between thumb and forefinger, feeling the slightly brittle plant crackle under the pressure, and contemplated watering it. 

Then he told himself how silly he was being, and sat down at the desk, pushing aside enough pieces of paper to give himself enough room to type. 

He had been asked to perform a more complicated, and delicate, task than simply giving himself access to a room that he shouldn't have had. He'd done that more than once since he'd starting working at Torchwood without getting caught by security. But Harkness had asked him to look up information that was almost certainly secured against intrusion. 

He only had a limited amount of time. If he was gone too long from the labs, someone would notice, and wonder about his absence. So he bent over the desk, one eye on the clock, and started to work. 

** 

Ianto had alloted himself an hour to try and crack the database open, and nearing the end of that time, while he had made some progress, the contents of the files remained frustratingly closed to him. The computer that managed the main archives and data storage wasn't the dumb locking system used for the doors, it was also the one that did the data processing for the science departments. It was adaptive and, Ianto had to admit, clever. 

At the end of the day, the best he could do was to get the computer to release the abstracts database. It gave brief descriptions of the technology acquired Torchwood and would then supply the link to the appropriate file on the subject if the user had the correct authorisation, which Ianto most certainly didn't. 

What it did have, however, was the name of the scientist who submitted the report in each instance. He skimmed through the descriptions, looking for something familiar, and his eyes settled on a likely candidate and, more to the point, there was a name he recognised attached to it. 

He pulled the phone out of his pocket, and quickly typed out a message. Then he shut down the terminal, made a mental resolution to have words with the office's usual occupant about the care and feeding of plants, and let himself out. 

** 

_There's a device in the archives from eight years ago that matches the cube's description. No indication where it is or what it's for. The name of the senior researcher is Doctor Mark Hullum._

Jack had called the Hub to find out where he could find this particular researcher, and the answer had been rather surprising. 

Greentree Secondary Modern was a school in the suburbs of Essex, and required a long car journey and a frustrated negotiation of the south eastern motorway system to reach. The particular town that the school was located in could be described as 'run down' if one were inclined to be kind. The inside was clean, if slightly shabby, and a reception area could be see behind a desk separated from the waiting area with a glass partition. 

He strode up in his very best 'confident Torchwood agent' stride, and leaned on the desk. "Hi, I'm Captain Jack Harkness. I'm here to see Doctor Hullum." 

The woman at the desk, a middle aged lady with a flower-print silk blouse, turned away from the conversation she'd been having with her colleagues sitting at other desks. She blinked at him owlishly from behind glasses that seemed one size too large for her. 

"Yes?" she asked, pushing the glasses further up the bridge of her nose. "Can I help you?" 

He stared at her for a moment, but when he realised she wasn't joking, he cleared his throat and repeated, "I'm Captain Jack Harkness, I'm here to see Doctor Hullum." 

Her gaze dropped to the computer screen in front of her, and out of his sight, and he wondered exactly what she was expecting to see there. "Is he expecting you?" she asked, dubiously. 

"I'm with Torchwood," he said. 

The receptionist blinked again, the expression magnified by the thick lenses of her glasses. "Is that part of Ofsted?" she asked. 

"Oh my god!" One of the other women in the reception area, which seemed to be doubling as an administrative office, suddenly squealed. She'd clearly been eavesdropping on the whole exchange. "Are you American? I love your accent! It's so cute!" 

Jack thought about correcting her, but realised that it would take much more effort than he wanted to expend, not to mention slightly counter-productive. "Why yes," he said, giving her the broadest and most charming grin he could manage, "Yes I am." 

"Oh wow," said another woman, who had been ostensibly lurking since Jack had started talking. "Say something in American." 

Slightly nonplussed, Jack looked back at the receptionist. "Ah, is Mark Hullum here? I'm a representative of Her Majesty's government and I need to speak to him on a matter of some importance." 

The woman who had apparently found his accent to be 'cute', stood up and walked over to the reception desk. "Is he in trouble? Is he a terrorist? Did he not pay his taxes?" 

This reaction was apparently what convinced the receptionist to act. She stood, took off her glasses and let them dangle from a chain around her neck. "I'll take you to see him," she said, "Millicent, get back to work." 

The woman offered up a sulky look and shuffled back to her desk. 

The receptionist made him sign for a visitors badge, and then led him through corridors bereft of children. Through the glass windows in some of the doors, Jack could see classes ongoing, their pupils enduring them in various states of boredom. Eventually Jack was led up two flights of stairs, down a hallway, and let into a small staffroom adjacent to the science labs. 

"Wait here, please," she said, "I'll tell Mark you're in here." 

He passed the time poking about the cupboards, though he found nothing more interesting than some coffee cups and catering size tins of instant coffee. A loud bell rang, and the sound of boistrous children came through the doors from the corridor. A minute or two later, the door opened, and a man stood there, glaring at him with wariness in his eyes, and Jack knew this was the man he'd come to see. 

"Doctor Hullum," he said, politely. 

"Just Mark Hullum," the man said, sounding tired. "The Doctorate was just one of the things Torchwood decided to take away from me." He wasn't old, barely middle-aged, really, but the lines on his face made him seem older than he was. His voice was gravelly and deep. "I don't know why you're here. I've not been telling anyone. I've not done anything you can take me in for." 

Jack held up his hands to forestall the protests. "I'm not from Torchwood One, I'm from Torchwood Three. I've no interest in why you were fired." 

Hullum grunted and stepped inside the staffroom proper, letting the door swing shut behind him. "Being fired sounds positively civilised. They needed someone to blame for the accident, and I was a convenient target." He spread his hands. "And in the blink of an eye, I go from the head of a research division at a secret organisation dedicated to fighting aliens to teaching secondary school physics to eleven year olds whose grasp of technology only extends as far as which is the coolest iPod." 

Jack suddenly remembered where he'd heard Mark Hullum's name before. He'd heard about it in a roundabout fashion, from the head of Torchwood Two, who, while not exactly being his best friend, hadn't had the all-encompassing loathing for him that Yvonne did. There had been an explosion in the hangars of Torchwood Tower. A containment field on an alien engine core had destabalised, the ship too damaged to truly be salvageable. In truth, it hadn't been anyone's fault, the core could have ruptured at any time, and they were frankly lucky that it hadn't levelled half of central London, but the resulting explosion had killed twenty three people, and seriously damaged the Tower's structure. The management had needed someone to blame, and the Head of Research was as good a target as any. 

"Sometimes I wish they had put me in prison, or sent me off to an asylum, or even had me killed." Hullum threw himself on one of the low uncomfortable chairs that were pushed together and pretended to be a sofa. "But someone thought it would be humiliating enough to send me here." 

Jack sat down opposite him. "You didn't actually betray Torchwood. They'd have a hard time justifying killing you, when all they wanted was a scapegoat." 

The door opened again, and they both looked up to see another man, only slightly younger than Hullum, standing in the open doorway. The newcomer regarded Jack with open suspicion. "Mark," he said, not looking away from Jack, "Are you ok? They said there was someone from the government here to see you." 

"I'm fine," Hullum said, looking unaccountably nervous all of a sudden. "It's fine. Don't you have a class to teach?" 

The man frowned. "Are you sure you don't want me to get security?" 

"I'm _fine_ ," Hullum repeated. "Go on." 

With a final suspicious glower, the man left. Hullum glanced at Jack. "I didn't tell anyone anything. _Anyone_." 

"I told you, I don't care about that." Jack glanced at the doorway. "You didn't lose everything then." 

Hullum managed, with some restraint, not to look in the same direction. "No," he said, quietly, "Some things I've gained." He cleared his throat. "If you didn't want to talk to me about my being fired, what _do_ you want?" 

Jack leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. "Torchwood London has found a piece of alien technology in a commercial building in the city. Certain... things... have led me to believe this isn't a new piece of technology at all, but something they're familiar with. It's a cube..." He described the artefact as best he could, sketching out all the details he knew. 

Hullum nodded thoughtfully as Jack spoke, and when he was finished, made a thoughtful 'hmm' noise. "It... sounds familiar," he said, "At least to one thing I remember studying, but it can't be the same device, not at all." 

Jack frowned, "Why not?" 

"Because the device we examined was small. It fit in the palm of the hand." Hullum sketched out a rough square on his palm, in illustration. "Torchwood shot down a Jvari smuggler's ship over Snowdon about eighteen years ago. There were crates in the hold full of various bits and pieces they'd salvaged from a dozen worlds. They weren't labelled of course. No way to know where it came from." He held up a finger. "I did establish one thing. It was far more massive than it seemed." 

"Meaning?" 

"That its mass had been offset into another dimension," Hullum said. "One of my colleagues had a theory that it was one way of getting a supercomputer into the palm of your hand, without worrying about space or heat output. In fact, we theorised that some of the internal structure looked a bit like data storage wafers and..." Hullum broke off. "Actually, that would explain it." 

Jack watched as Hullum's brow furrowed in concentration, and fought the urge to smile. "What would?" 

"If it really was more massive than it appeared maybe... maybe that's why it's bigger now. Its mass is exiting the adjoining dimensions and manifesting in ours." 

Jack sat back abruptly. "Naderon radiation." 

Hullum looked confused, and Jack didn't blame him. In this era, most people, even people like Torchwood, weren't familiar with the energy output of dimensional transitions. Unless you were in Cardiff, of course, and saw it every day. 

"Naderon radiation can be confused with Alberta particles if you don't have a high resolution scanner," Jack said, "And Alberta particles are produced-" 

"When something moves between dimensional layers," Hullum finished. "Why is that significant?" 

"Never mind," said Jack. 

Hullum nodded, and looked thoughtful. "Who's head of research these days?" 

"Elmyra Swan, I think." 

Hullum snorted disdainfully. "I remember her when she was a snotty PhD candidate. That woman always knew her office politics better than her science. You'll be lucky if Torchwood London figure anything out about that thing before the next ice age." 

Jack had a feeling that Swan didn't need to work anything out for herself. If Asen had managed to figure out the cube better than Torchwood, then all Torchwood would need to do was go through their research. The only problem was that the Asen researchers had all died, along with everyone else in the building. 

"You know, I seem to recall that small cube vanishing," Hullum said, "There were rumours that it was stolen, but we were all officially told 'lost' and it would be recovered. I guess someone must have thought it would be worth more in the private sector." 

Jack decided not to mention all the dead bodies. "Thank you for your time, Doctor." 

Hullum stood, smiled thinly, and didn't correct him. He moved quickly, and left before Jack had even managed to stand. He thought for a moment, and then sent a message to his contact. 

_What word on the bodies? What about the Asen database?_

He shoved the phone back in his pocket, and left the room. He was halfway down the corridor, before a low, gravelly tone caught his attention, pitched suspiciously low. 

"I told you, I'm fine, and you really are supposed to be teaching." Hullum, and he was talking to the teacher that had interrupted them earlier. 

"I can't help but worry," his companion said. "You said they might-" 

"Don't worry about it. Just some old business. Nothing to concern yourself over." 

Jack carried on walking, taking himself down the stairs and out of the building. He knew without a doubt that, unlike he claimed to, Mark Hullum had definitely been telling people about Torchwood. And as much as he could appreciate the reasons behind it, all it did was put both Hullum and his friend in danger, leaving them open to getting killed, to say nothing of the open pain on Hullum's face whenever he thought about the wide Universe and all its wonders that were forever closed to him. Wasn't that cruel? 

Jack didn't often think about sharing the RetCon formula with London, given that he was fairly certain they'd abuse it, but he couldn't deny it was certainly better than their method of imprisonment, humiliation, or death. 

** 

Several files and a short note saying _'still working on Asen db'_ came through several hours later. Jack forwarded the files to Owen when they turned out to be filched copies of the Asen employees' autopsy reports. Owen called him back while Jack was sitting in a bar just outside the Festival Hall on the South bank, nursing a glass of water and watching smartly dressed people wander out of an evening's musical performance. 

"I think the London hacks are at a bit of a loss," Owen said, "Officially, the causes of death are down as 'multi-organ failure', but my explanation is the more interesting one." 

"Are you going to keep me in suspense?" Jack asked, gesturing for a refill of his glass. To keep the staff from kicking him out prematurely for only ordering water, he'd also ordered some food to go with it. He was absently eating nachos as he listened to Owen, and knew that the sound must be annoying. 

"Rapid total neural depolarisation." Owen sounded pleased with himself. 

Jack turned a nacho over in his fingers, ignoring the way he got grease on his hands as he did so. "You're assuming I have any idea what that is for some unknown reason." 

"Their brains were scrambled, or, more accurately, I suppose, wiped. The autonomic controls over the body failed. Heart, breathing, bloody pressure, blood sugar. It's all haywire, as if whoever was at the controls suddenly stepped out for a fag break and everything crashed while they were gone." Owen paused. "I doubt it was quick or painless, but if it's any consolation, I don't think they knew what was going on." 

Jack put the nacho down and pushed the plate away, suddenly not hungry. He was acutely aware that whatever had happened to the staff in the Asen building had probably happened to him as well. He didn't remember the moment of dying, didn't remember slipping into death, and so he supposed that the Asen staff had had the same comfort. That thought didn't mean it had been a pleasant death, though. It just meant he didn't remember. 

That was harder, in some ways. He could deal with unpleasant deaths (in the ranked list he'd been keeping in his head for the last sixty or so years, among the top five were having his brain bored out by an alien insect, disembowelling, and poisoning from a member of the Torchwood HR department - who had later turned out to have gone mad from a contemplation of an alien meditation puzzle not designed for her neurology), but it would have been more useful to know exactly what had _caused_ said death. 

His wriststrap beeped. He flipped it open and examined the readouts as Owen continued to speak. "I've been looking for anything that might have caused this, but no luck. Suzie says she's not having any joy with the archives either." 

Considering the cube had been found before Jack had severed all links with London, the records should have been down there in the Hub's vaults. Someone really needed to sort those places out, one day. "I've already found some details on that," he said, "She can stop looking." 

The wriststrap was displaying a local grid map, and a string of sensor data in a flickering stream. "Owen," he said, "I have to go." He put the phone down without waiting to listen to Owen's confused reply. 

A surge in Alberta particles, localised in the area of the Asen Industries building. He leapt to his feet, abandoning the food without paying, running for his car, praying that his fears about what he was going to find were wrong. 

** 

When Jack saw the dead bodies lying in the courtyard outside of the Asen building, he knew they hadn't been. 

** 


	3. Chapter 3

## Book III: The Book of Unintended Consequences

According to the official Torchwood policy on nomenclature ("On Naming Exotic Particles, Unknown Energy Waves and other Physics Peculiarities"), newly discovered phenomena were to be named after their discoverer. In the event that the identity of said discoverer was unknown, then it was acceptable to use the name of the place of discovery instead. This had, incidentally, led to the discovery of 'U-wave' radiation, so named because it was discovered in the U-Bend of the senior scientist's kitchen sink, and the 'Harkness' particle, much to Jack's chagrin. 

In the early thirties, a Torchwood team sent word from their investigations in Alberta, Canada, that they seemed to have found some form of spatial disturbance. When nothing was heard from the team again for another four months, a second team was dispatched. They found an abandoned camp site, and copious notes on their research, including detailed information about a new form of exotic particle. Of the team, and thus the discoverers, there was no sign, and the name of 'Alberta' was given to the unknown particle. It would be another fourteen years before they would be observed again, and the fate of the team, that they had probably been shifted into an adjacent dimension, was uncovered. 

The name even survived to Jack's time. He knew, better than anyone at Torchwood, that Alberta particles were harmless to organic life. While there were a fair few dimensional realities that were harmful to Humans, there were as many that weren't. Alberta particles were a side effect of dimensional travel, but they weren't intrinsically damaging. Something was crossing dimensions, and killing people at the same time. He knelt next to a body that was lying by the Torchwood vans that were parked outside the Asen building. Once upon a time, it had been a pretty young woman, a security officer, but now she was pale, cooling and still, and he didn't need to check her pulse to know that she was gone. 

He did so anyway, out of some sort of desperate wish to be proved wrong. 

He left the body, unable to do anything for her, and hurried into the building, hoping that history wouldn't be repeating itself and he wasn't about to get killed after setting foot inside. He ran up the stairs, stepping over or around bodies without care, knowing they were far beyond caring. Knowing which way to go, as he hadn't before, he was quickly in the cube room, and brought to a halt. The cube was definitely bigger than the last time he'd seen it. A lot bigger, nearly three meters along each edge. 

Surrounding it were white clad corpses. It conjured an extremely unpleasant sense of deja vu. 

A thought gripped him. He'd asked his contact to search the Asen database. What if...? 

He pulled the phone out of his pocket. _Where are you?_ he demanded. 

He stared at the phone for several minutes, until the reply came. _At Torchwood Tower. Why?_

He was relieved. He looked at the death all around him. _The TW staff at Asen are dead. Same as the original staff._

Jack could well imagine the verbal utterances that would accompany the reception of that. Then, 

_I should tell someone. Security._

_And how will you explain knowing?_

_I don't know. But if people are dead, management needs to know. You should leave before it kills you too._

Jack gripped the phone tighter. He wished there was a number or a contact associated with the messages. It would be easier to just call this mysterious individual, speak to them, convince them, but all he had was a few lines of text at a time. On the other hand, the textual medium gave him a chance to moderate his language somewhat. _If you want to do something, you're going to help me fix this problem. Torchwood London's failed twice. Help me._

Eventually, the reply came. _What do you need?_

_Asen managed to activate the cube somehow. Torchwood was trying hack the files. Asen might have info on how to shut it down. Find it._

_I don't know if I can._

_You're going to do it. And if you don't, more people will die._ It wasn't definite, but almost certain. Jack felt no shame in using guilt to get his mysterious contact into helping him. 

_I'll try. Are you in the Asen building?_

_Yes._

_There should be a live hookup to the TW system. Make sure it's still working and redirect the feed to my console._

Jack looked around the cube's room, trying not to look too hard at the still bodies. There was a control station, a series of computers and monitors being fed by thick industrial power cabling. Two technicians were draped artlessly over the keyboards, and one was sprawled on the floor. He took a moment to gently pull them away, and drag them over to the wall, out of the way. He only realised, as he bent to pick up the woman on the floor, that the label on her white overalls read 'Swan, E.' and he realised who it was. 

He sighed, sadly, and put her next to her former subordinates. 

It was easy to check the consoles, and get into their functions. They'd been left unlocked, their previous users still logged in. The system was designed not to directly act as an access point for the data, but there were searching programs installed which were drilling down through the layers of security lockouts and directly on-passing the data to Torchwood London. He had no way of directly viewing or affecting the information itself, but it was a simple matter to check whether it was still working and where the data was heading to. He looked at his phone again, read the rest of the message, and found the a string of numbers denoting where in the system Jack had to route the dataflow. 

It was the work of only a few moments, and then he had to sit back and wait. _There,_ he sent back, _You should have it now._

He looked at the response and laughed. 

_Ok, working. Btw, if I get caught and fired, you have to promise to give me a new job._

** 

Ianto was actually starting to enjoy himself, in a slightly hysterical and possibly deranged sort of fashion. While he'd certainly chosen a very risky course of action in subverting Yvonne Hartman's authority, he couldn't deny the thrill of it all. 

The sane and rational part of his brain, the part he was desperately trying to ignore, was reminding him that excitement would do him no good if he got caught. Hopefully that wouldn't happen. The lab was empty and abandoned, left alone to Ianto when he had volunteered to monitor the experiments that couldn't be left alone overnight. The only other people in the building were the skeleton night staff – people like himself working on late research projects or manning critical systems – and building security. He was reasonably sure that as long as he had valid authorisation to be in the lab, security wouldn't bother him with exactly what he was doing in there. 

He had appropriated Hassan's station, partly because he wasn't stupid enough to use his own interface, and partly because Hassan had a few extra pieces of analysis kit that Ianto didn't. Hassan's speciality was data analysis and he had a decide which Ianto and a fair few other researchers secretly coveted. 

It was a small holographic plate that looked like an ordinary tablet input device if you didn't know what it was. There was an associated stylus that an operator could use to poke the hologram floating six inches above the desk in full three-dimensional glory. It was currently in its idle 'no input' mode, a sphere depicting a slowly changing spectrum of colours. When Ianto had poked it with the stylus, its surface had rippled like the disturbed water of a pond. 

It had been briefly amusing to play with while he waited, an amusement cut short when Harkness suddenly redirected the dataflow from the Asen Industries building, and the visualisation leapt into a frenzy of activity, the sphere changing into polygons that Ianto had no name for, altering in size and colour. He jumped, pulling the stylus away and glancing around guiltily, as if worried he was about to get caught playing around with a multi-million piece of alien-derived technology. He sent a brief acknowledgement to Harkness, then put the stylus down and turned to the slightly more standard keyboard and monitor set-up. He wasn't familiar enough with the holographic interface to manipulate it quickly, and he was soon distracted from it. 

Asen Industries, Ianto discovered, as reams of information flashed across his monitor, had managed to set up an interface with whatever was under the glittering exterior shell of the cube. How, Ianto had no clue, but from what he could see, it had neither been cheap nor easy. Between what Asen had started, and Torchwood had continued, the artefact had been on the verge of cracking open and divesting all its secrets to the outside world. It only took a few nudges from Ianto – a variable here, a line of code there – and suddenly the cube's inner workings unfurled before him like an blossoming flower. 

He realised that the team on-site must have been on the verge of a breakthrough, and felt sick. Was that what had killed them? Had the cube used some sort of self-defence measure to kill anyone nearby if it felt threatened in some way? 

Quickly, he sent a message. _Are you ok?_

A long wait, while Ianto gripped the phone and nearly forgot to breathe, and then: _Yes. Why?_

He breathed a sigh of relief. _Just checking. I've accessed the cube._

_Anything yet?_

The screen was spewing alien characters a mile a minute. Ianto winced. _Give me a minute._ He put the phone down and called up the translation matrix. It took more than a moment or two, but the computer must have been able to find a related language in its files, as the nonsense text slowly started to resolve into more understandable English words and Roman numerals. 

The problem when trying to understand alien technology was not its complexity, or its strange building materials, or even how many fingers the buttons were designed for, but simply that it was alien. It had been designed by aliens whose brains (if they had brains at all and not some distributed neural network) were not wired the same way as humans. It was created by creatures who were products of a different evolutionary system, different flora and fauna, different ways of putting things together, different stories and different ways of seeing things. According to office gossip, it was trying to translate this alien nature into some form of Human analogue that so often turned Torchwood employees into gibbering wrecks, if not completely insane. Ianto was slightly better able to cope with it than others – everyone seemed to have different levels of 'alien-ness' they could stand – but even he felt his brain aching as he tried to understand what he was reading in front of him. 

The best way to start to approach the problem was to try to think of something, anything, that might approximate what the aliens were trying to do. As much as every species had different approaches to a problem, those problems were usually the same. 

As Ianto had gained a lot of experience lately in cracking into databases and information systems, it didn't take very long for him to start seeing familiar patterns in the data. Information was organised into discrete packets, and they all interacted in very specific ways. The cube was definitely some sort of data storage device, but the data contained within it wasn't static, it was changing even as Ianto watched, new variables being written and additional lines spawning to fill the screen. 

He leaned forward resting his head on his fist as he squinted at the screen. He scowled as he tried to isolate one particular code grouping. Some sort of data processing was happening, but what sort? 

In his fierce concentration, he didn't notice that the holographic visualisation had changed. 

He did hear the voice though. 

"Hello?" 

He jerked upright, and glanced around the lab. There was no one there. The door was still firmly shut and locked. Ianto swallowed, sternly ordering his heart to stop beating so madly. It had probably just come from a communications link someone had left open at another desk. When the person calling got no response, they'd likely give up. 

He bent back towards the screen. 

"I saw that. I know you can hear me." 

The other explanation was, of course, that the stress of the situation had finally gotten to him and he was hearing voices. He slid off the chair, standing warily. 

"Yes. You. Down here." 

Ianto, against his better judgement, glanced downwards. 

Standing on the hologram pad attached to Hassan's computer was a Human shape. Seven inches high, it had no features, no hair, no lips or eyes, or even fingers. It was like someone had seen a silhouette of a Human and carved a reproduction out of flickering amber light. It had arms, legs, a head, but no way of telling if it had a gender. 

It waved at him. 

"Hello," it said. 

Ianto looked in bemusement at the hologram, and searched his memory. He was reasonably sure he'd never heard of this sort of thing happening before. He glanced between the screen and the holopad and wondered if he should turn it off and on again. Maybe that would reset whatever daft program Hassan had left running. 

He started to reach towards the power cord, intent on yanking it out. 

"Hey!" The hologram waved its arms abruptly, and the speakers popped at the sudden increase in volume. Ianto jerked his hand away out of reflex. 

"That's better," it continued, "No putting the phone down on me until we've had a chance to chat, ok?" 

The voice generated was strange. It had American inflections, but a neutrality to it that spoke of it being computer generated. It sounded like the text-to-speech programs that resided in the system that no one ever used. 

He cautiously sat down again, and tapped the keyboard. Sure enough, said program was running, and it was hooked into... 

He hesitated. It was receiving input from the Asen datastream. 

"Who are you?" he asked, warily. 

"I can see your lips moving," the hologram said (Ianto glanced reflexively over to the small webcam embedded in the monitor frame), "Turn on the microphone, would you?" 

Warily, Ianto pressed the switch on the desk and repeated the question. 

"Doesn't really matter, does it?" the hologram said. It sounded amused. 

Ianto looked dubious. "It does if you're hacking the Torchwood systems." 

"You're alone in a lab and you're using a spoofed ID. You're not hacking the system?" 

Ianto frowned, slightly annoyed to have to concede that point to a hologram. "You're accessing the system via the Asen Industries computer system," he said, "Are you an employee?" 

"No," the hologram raised an arm as if rubbing the back of its head, "You could say I was just unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time." 

"I don't understand," Ianto said, "Who _are_ you?" 

"If you're Torchwood you might have heard of me," the hologram said, "I suppose you can say that I am the recreation of one Captain Jack Harkness. Nice to meet you." 

** 

To say that Ianto was surprised was a small understatement. He managed to keep his wits about him long enough to blurt out a few questions about why Ianto was supposed to believe him and what was going on, and how was he hacking the datastream and what did he mean 'recreation'? 

The hologram, and the voice that went with it, just seemed rather amused by the whole performance, and, when Ianto calmed down, the hologram said, gesticulating illustratively, "The cube that you found is an artefact of an alien society that destroyed themselves, and encoded themselves onto its hardware." 

Ianto rather regretted that he wasn't the hard-drinking sort. At least then he would have had an explanation for the remarkably odd experience he was having. "What are you talking about?" he asked. 

"There was no great impetus behind their decision," the hologram of Jack Harkness said, still lacking detail and definition, though if Ianto squinted, he thought he could make out an attempt to depict clothing. "They weren't a dying species, nor was their world under threat. They were just experimenting, trying to see if they _could_ do it. It was a great technological experiment that went unfortunately wrong." 

"The cube? An experiment gone wrong? People have a habit of dying around it," Ianto said, "I'd say that was a bit of a flaw." 

"Exactly," the hologram said, "Their ability to store information had been growing exponentially for decades, and some bright spark lit upon the idea that rather than just storing books, or art, or music, they could store thoughts and memories. They could build a device that would forever keep a copy of someone's mind. It would enable people to forever remember their deceased loved ones, and the knowledge of scientists, of artists and writers would never be lost. They created technology that would scan a person's brain right down to the subatomic level, and recreate it in the core of the machine. They forgot one simple principle, however." 

The hologram paused, expectantly. Ianto frowned, feeling vaguely like he was being quizzed in a classroom. He searched his thoughts for a minute, and then recalled something, something from the machinery of teleportation, something that had to be compensated for... 

"It is not possible to measure both the position and momentum of a particle with precise accuracy." 

The hologram nodded, though it was more like the inclination of the entire top half of its body. "Or, as you might otherwise know it, the 'Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle'. It was their biggest barrier to the technology working. They couldn't precisely measure the subatomic particles, and so could not recreate accurately. They did create a workaround, though, and activated their machine." 

Ianto looked at the hologram, discomfort gnawing at his stomach. He had a feeling he knew exactly what that work around was. "What happened?" 

"Their workaround compensated, all right. Instead of creating flawed copies of a person, the recreation was perfect. In the process, however, it completely annihilated the mind of the original person. When they switched on the machine for the first test, built partly outside of normal space in order to compensate for the massive amount of storage space needed, they didn't realise that the machine, self-replicating and self-altering, was drawing upon the energy from other dimensions. Its output was massive. The moment they flicked the switch, the machine scanned the minds of everyone on their world, and stored them in its memory. It killed everyone." 

Ianto blinked, drew back. "The Asen staff..." 

"Incorporated. Like me. I'm a copy of the original man. No less for it, I might add. I don't really miss my body, but I think that's a product of not having it at all." 

"But-" Ianto stopped. _But I met you, you're still alive._ He'd read Jack Harkness's file. It was a useless thing to say. 

"The machine - the archive of souls, I suppose you could call it - was left abandoned. Over the centuries, as the world decayed around it, it was damaged. I'm guessing, considering that it's on Earth now, that it was picked up by scavengers exploring dead worlds. Asen repaired it enough that it activated, but nowhere near as powerfully as it did before, it only stored the minds in its immediate vicinity. I think I know why it's broken. There was... something happened to space and time a long while ago. It damaged reality, cascaded throughout the dimensions, and strangled the archive's power supply. It's starting to repair itself though." 

"It killed again. Wiped out the Torchwood team studying it." 

"I guessed that. We've had some new..." the hologram waved its arm vaguely, "Immigrants." 

"What do you need me to do?" Ianto asked, "I'm guessing you're not talking to me just to provide useful exposition." 

The hologram laughed, the sound poorly rendered through the desk speakers. "All the minds in this thing they... well... they formed a sort of gestalt consciousness over the millennia. I'm not sure what to call it. It doesn't really call itself anything. The Archivist, maybe. Or the Librarian." There was a pause. "I like that. Librarian. Brings to mind pencil skirts, and scholarly little pairs of glasses. The Librarian didn't really have any awareness of the outside world, not until Asen and then Torchwood set up the datalink with the outside world. It knows what's going on, and it doesn't want to kill everyone on Earth like it did its own homeworld. It sent me to talk to you for a reason." 

The hologram assumed a gesture that Ianto could almost describe as smug. "You see, it has a plan." 

** 

_The cube says it's lost. It needs to be pushed back into its outside dimensions but doesn't know the way. Any ideas?_

Jack stared in disbelief at the screen of his phone. _Aside from a magic wand?_ he typed, then sighed, and deleted it. 

He looked up at the cube's façade. It was pulsing in neon shades underneath its surface, and yet somehow managed to seem malevolent. Maybe that was just the influence of the pile of corpses that tended to appear around it. 

On the other hand, the cube didn't screech a war cry, didn't snap razor sharp teeth or threaten to tear flesh with poisoned tipped claws. Its menace was more subtle, the slow creep of mysterious death, rather than the risk of being torn limb from limb. Its victims hadn't suffered, Jack knew, they had just died. If it was malevolent, then that was tempered by the fact that it was at least merciful in its killing. 

It didn't seem like your typical doomsday weapon, and in his tenure with Torchwood, Jack had seen his fair share of those. None of them were as gaudy, or as large as the cube was. If someone designed a weapon seriously intended to kill someone, then they went for functional, nondescript. There was no point creating something that had colours and light running underneath the surface when there was no intention of anyone ever surviving to get a good look at it. If he were pushed, he would almost be inclined to say that this was a work of art, an alien work of art of course, but art nonetheless. 

Now there was a sickening thought. Death as performance art. 

There were some things in the Universe that Jack was occasionally glad not to have been witness to. There was a cold kernel of dread in his stomach as he wondered if that was what the cube was. He shook his head. His contact said that the cube was lost. That implied two things: that whatever was inside the cube was intelligent, and that it was passing through dimensions unintentionally. 

Official Torchwood policy regarding wandering aliens was capture or kill. It was one of the many reasons why Jack had severed contact with the main branch upon his 'promotion' to the head of Torchwood Cardiff. He had better ways to deal with the lost. 

He stared deeply into the depths of the cube, so intent was he upon making his decision that he heard the footsteps before he saw them. Six black clad figures, all with a familiar stylised T as the only decoration on their uniforms, snugly placed over the right breast, burst through the doorway, spreading out, each carrying a rifle which they raised an aimed unerringly towards Jack. 

"Sir!" one of them called out, standing by the pile of bodies. 

There was no way of distinguishing the leader, until he nodded sharply, tightening his grip on his gun and narrowing his eyes at Jack. Jack raised his hands and smirked at them. 

"Didn't anyone ever tell you it's not nice to go around shooting superior officers?" 

There was a bare instant of hesitation, and Jack knew instantly that he would be able to control the situation. If they'd been smart, they would have shot first and asked questions later. Finally their leader spoke up. 

"Who are you?" he demanded, "What happened to the Torchwood staff?" 

"Captain Jack Harkness, Torchwood Three," Jack said, and moved one hand slowly, pointing in the direction of the bodies that he'd carefully moved to the side and covered in a tarpaulin he'd found in an adjoining area. "And the staff were already dead when I got here." 

The men didn't move. "Identification," the leader snapped. 

Jack reeled off his official ID number, which really wasn't good for much as far as Yvonne Hartman was concerned, but it would at least confirm his identity. He could always provoke them into shooting him, and make good his escape after waking up, but he didn't trust them to solve this problem, didn't trust them to finish the job of getting rid of the cube, of sending it on its way. They might destroy it, of course, but whatever was inside would die along with the cube. He would bet good money on London thinking that a few dozen deaths were acceptable losses if the reward was advanced alien technology. "I'm taking over this operation," he said, putting every inch of authority he could manage into his voice, "You can either help me, or you can get lost now and know you helped kill an awful lot of people when this thing finishes crossing over dimensions." 

The leader shifted from one foot to another, glancing at one of his team. That one nodded, presumably confirming the ID's authenticity, and then the leader said, tentatively, "We'll need authorisation from-" 

Jack made a cutting motion with his hand, striding forward. The action startled the assault team, clearly not expecting someone they were holding at gunpoint to risk moving. "I'm in charge here, and I've got the authority. Either you help me, or you get the hell out of here." 

It was a gamble. They were armed, and while Jack was as well, he wouldn't last for long against half a dozen rifle-bearing grunts with paramilitary training. If they chose to take issue with his instructions, there wasn't much Jack could do about it. But Jack had learnt, long ago and in the days before his life became an endless cycle of dying and waking up afterwards, that confidence was everything. 

The leader wavered a moment, his fingers twitching as if thinking about going for the radio. Then he nodded, and lowered his rifle. The team followed suit. "Officer Bowen, sir." 

"Officer's your first name, is it?" 

Bowen looked nonplussed. "Anthony," he said. 

"Right! Anthony it is then," he grinned, showing mostly teeth, and slung an arm around Bowen's shoulders, turning him towards the cube. "That, Anthony, is an unknown device of alien origin which is partly embedded in dimensions other than the ones we inhabit. For all we know, it's the size of Poland, and it's slowly exiting into our reality. Every time it edges out further, it kills whoever happens to be around it. I generally consider this to be a bad thing, how about you?" 

Officer Anthony Bowen looked like he wasn't sure if this was a test or not. "Er..." He glanced at his squad, who all looked back blankly. "I... agree, sir?" 

"Absolutely right of you, Anthony. So, we need to force it back into the dimensions whence it came, and to do that, we're going to need a power source with at least a two gigawatt output. Don't suppose you have one of those handy?" 

One of the assault team cleared her throat. "Uh, sir..." She glanced around, giving the cube a nervous look. "We, uh... do. Cold fusion cell in the van. Just in case, you know?" 

Jack grinned and clapped Anthony Bowen on the back. "God bless the Torchwood emergency response unit. More prepared than your average boy scout troop. Right then!" He pointed three of the six grunts. "You lot. Got and set up a roadblock. I don't want anyone coming within a hundred yards of this place." 

They'd lost all thought of treating him as a threat now. They straightened and barked, "Yes, sir!" before hustling out of the door. Jack turned to Bowen, and the two remaining soldiers, including the sole female member of the team, who he would later find out was called Allison. "You two, go fetch the fusion cell and quickly." 

And shortly after that, Jack was alone in the room, with only the cube for company. "Right then," he told it, "Dimensional transit." He unfastened his wrist-strap. "Fortunately for you, that's a bit of a speciality of mine." 

** 

"What's it like in there?" 

The holographic representation of a man who Ianto knew was currently in a building several miles away had been standing idly for a while now, and now it suddenly flickered, acquiring animation. He rather got the impression that the mind behind the puppet hadn't been paying attention to its actions. "In the machine?" it asked in return. 

Ianto nodded. "Yes." 

They were waiting to hear back from the hologram's real counterpart, although Ianto hadn't mentioned who exactly he was in contact with, merely saying it was a 'friend'. 

The simulation seemed to think about that for a moment. "Would you believe me if I told you that it wasn't the strangest feeling I've ever had in my existence?" 

Ianto smiled slightly. "Very probably." 

"Well, it's true." The hologram paused another moment, and just when Ianto thought that it had said all it was going to, it continued, the artificial recreation removing any trace of Humanity that might have been behind it. "I thought I should be more upset about losing my body, but that's not really the case. Perhaps it's the lack of hormones. Without nerves and chemicals and biological responses, there's just thought. There's a purity to it, I suppose, but it's not very colourful." 

Ianto frowned. "Then you're not... happy... in there?" 

"No, but then I'm not sad either. I don't feel much either way. I just am, though there is perhaps a vague sense of nostalgia." The hologram waved an arm. "It could be worse. I could be on my own. But there's the Librarian, and all the Asen and Torchwood minds that were incorporated into the machine. If I have to spend the rest of my existence in here, then I suppose it's not so bad. I just wish..." 

The hologram trailed off, and after a moment, Ianto prompted, "You wish...?" 

A pop of static, the equivalent of a gusty sigh, came over the speakers. "There's someone who was... very special to me. I wish I could have seen him one last time." 

Ianto leaned forward, and rested his chin on his hand. "Tell me about him," he said. 

The simulacrum wavered slightly as the mind behind it contemplated the answer. "Brave, amazing, deeply wounded, with big ears and an ego to match." 

"That doesn't tell me much," Ianto said, with a faint smile. 

"It tells you everything you need to know," the hologram told him. "Anything more than that is just extraneous." 

The phone beeped. Ianto glanced down at it. 

_Alright, so I think I have an idea._

** 

The Torchwood Goons, as Jack had affectionately taken to calling the rifle-bearing troops that London euphemistically called 'External Security', were nothing if not quick. In no time at all, it seemed, they were re-entering the room with the cube, fusion cell held between them. Officer Anthony Bowen glanced between the cell and the cube, his expression dubious, and said, "I don't exactly see a three pin socket on that thing." 

Jack looked up from fiddling with his wriststrap. His phone was lying, dissected, on the computer console, the SIM card extracted. "You're thinking too contemporaneously," he said, chidingly, in the same tone of voice one might use to a child who had just stuffed a crayon up their nose. "Once upon a time, the idea of being able to talk down a phone that didn't have any wires connected to it was pure fantasy. Once upon a time, you couldn't transmit moving pictures to a glass screen in the corner of the living room." 

Bowen looked slightly chagrined, and faintly annoyed. "Sufficiently advanced technology, I get it." 

"Nice to see you've been keeping up with your classics. Now let's see how you are on dimensional topography." He laid the SIM card on top of the wriststrap, and began pressing buttons, reconfiguring the system to transfer data. "What do you know about moving transdimensionally?" 

"Uh..." Officer Bowen glanced at his team, but they didn't look at all eager to step up and answer any questions. "You... can't? It's..." Vague memories of Torchwood lectures came back to him, and he blurted, "It's like pages in a book. You can't jump from one to another." 

Jack shook his head and made a disappointed tutting noise. "You're thinking of trans _universal_ travel. It takes more energy than anyone can generate to step across the void between the pages, but it's possible, though I've never heard of it happening personally. You're halfway there, but the part where you start to go wrong is where you start thinking of dimensions as separate entities. You don't separate out length, breadth and depth when you examine a cube," he jerked his head towards the largest example of the shape in the room, "So why try to distinguish more than that? All dimensions are intrinsically connected; they're all facets of the Universe. It's how the Universal Timecode works. You find enough common factors across enough dimensions and you can compensate for relativistic effects and keep time perfectly in sync with anyone, anywhere." 

The wriststrap beeped, and began its data transfer. Bowen was starting to look cross-eyed as he struggled to follow what Jack was saying. "Now keep up," he said, "There'll be a test on this later. 

"You can move voluntarily in three dimensions because you know how to. You can move linearly in time because you don't know any other way. It's no different with travelling through and around other dimensions. You just need to know where you are, and where you're going." The wriststrap chirruped a confirmation that it had finished its job. 

He reassembled the phone with barely a glance, and then only to make sure the battery was being inserted the right way. "Anything that exists across more than one dimension must be capable of dimensional mapping. Otherwise it would be like having your head in France, but not knowing if your feet were in Luxembourg or Belgium, and you're trying to get to Venezuela, but you're not sure which way that is. It's been damaged by a lack of power, but, my sources say, it has self-repair functions. And once it's working again, it needs to know where to go." 

He flicked the power switch, and watched the phone boot up. There was a whole new operating system layered on top of the original programming. It wouldn't increase your free minutes per month, or enable galactic roaming, but it would allow the phone to send very large amounts of data in a highly compressed burst. Especially useful if you wanted to dump a large amount of data to a receiving handset. "So," Jack said, "I'm going to draw it a road map." 

** 

Ianto had hooked the phone up to the computer at the insistence of the Captain Harkness that was real and not incorporated into some alien library. The hologram had changed from that of a generic humanoid figure to a flickering display of lines and curvatures that made Ianto's head hurt to look at it. 

"Yes," the computer murmured, making Ianto jump, "This is good. This is exactly what we need. This is... very familiar." 

Ianto stiffened. Irrationally, he felt like backing away from the computer. "Oh?" 

"Yes. I used to have a copy of exactly these sort of maps. In fact..." The scrolling lines froze, then zipped by at such speed that Ianto could tell something specific was being searched for. Finally it froze on a tiny line of dots with a flourish at the end. It meant nothing to Ianto, but to the simulacrum of Jack Harkness, it was clearly of great importance. 

"Ah," the computer voice said, "You didn't tell me you knew my counterpart." 

Ianto thought about trotting out some lame cliché like "you didn't ask", but felt that it was wiser to keep quiet. 

"I suppose it doesn't matter. In your place I'd do exactly the same thing. Though..." The voice sounded uneasy. "Did you... know? About the fact that if I was incorporated, I must have died, and if you know me and I don't know you, you must have met me after I... got better?" 

Ianto swallowed against a dry throat. "I knew," he said, hoarsely, "Mostly because I don't know when to let something go. My girlfriend says it's going to get me killed one of these days." 

"That Torchwood London sneakiness, I might have known. I'm not angry, Ianto Jones. I'm not capable of anger any more. There is perhaps a certain amount of disappointment at your lack of willingness to share the truth." 

Ianto stared at the phone's screen. **Data Transfer 78% Complete** was on the screen. The information, maps that spanned 47 dimensions, he was told, was still downloading. "I..." He sighed, "I've never actually met you. I just read your file." 

"But you're talking to me. Him. I can see your message history – ah. You portray yourself as a mysterious informant. How James Bond of you. And how very foolish. You must know what will happen if you get caught." 

"I know." It didn't matter, Ianto told himself. This was important. He had to do it, especially now he knew exactly what the cube was capable of doing to the world. 

"He will not thank you. He might be amused. He might be disgusted at your foolhardiness. I don't know. It's becoming harder to think like a Human. Is that a bad thing?" 

Ianto desperately wished for the pseudo-Human interaction the hologram had allowed him. "If you're about to spend eternity in an alien data storage device, probably not." 

**Data Transfer 96% Complete**

"I suppose that's true. Perhaps you're smart, as well as foolish. Why did you do this?" 

"Because..." Ianto thought for a long moment. For all his justifications, his curiosity, there probably was only one real reason behind it all. "Because I can." 

The simulacrum laughed, just a little. "How Human of you. I shouldn't criticise. Humanity went to the stars for less reason." 

The phone beeped, just as Ianto opened his mouth to ask what exactly it meant by that. **Data Transfer 100% Complete** , it read. 

"That's all the Librarian needs." Even as Ianto watched, the massive download disappeared into the direct link between Torchwood and the Cube. "It's grateful, I think." 

"Thank you... I think," Ianto said, with a slight smile. 

"Goodbye, Ianto Jones," the recreation of Jack Harkness said, "Hopefully you and I will meet in the flesh again soon. For his sake, I hope _very_ soon." 

Ianto started to laugh, but then the screen cleared, and the datastream snapped off without ceremony. The lab suddenly seemed quieter. He looked thoughtfully at the hologram pad and smiled faintly. It was worth it. The lies and sneaking, and he'd helped save the world. Not that anyone would know, but it had definitely been worth it. 

The door crashed open with such force that it tore one of the hinges free. Ianto had leapt out of his chair at the first crash of plywood, but froze when he realised that those who had caused the doors destruction were armed, angry looking, and had their rifles pointed in his direction. He felt dizzy, and clutched the edge of the table with his fingertips. 

"Ianto Jones." 

Yvonne Hartman was standing just inside the doorway, behind her two security guards. Miriam Bell stood out in the corridor, hands in her lab coat pockets and smiling vaguely. 

Yvonne's own smile was tight and mirthless. "I think we need to have a little chat, don't you?" 

** 

Jack had re-secured his wriststrap, and ordered the Goons to deactivate the safeties preventing the fusion cell from suffering a catastrophic overload. 

"If you think I'm going to allow you to blow up this building," Anthony Bowen started to splutter, his fingers automatically starting to reach for the rifle he still had slung over his shoulder. 

Jack shook his head, gesturing dismissively. "Nothing of the sort. Trust me, dying is no fun at all and I have no intention of doing that again today." 

"But..." Allison bit her lip and spoke up. Clearly, she was the technical specialist of the group. Jack was willing to bet that if she was wearing her in-house uniform, she'd have rank bars saying exactly that on her arm. "Removing the safeties _will_ cause a catastrophic build-up. The energy doesn't have anywhere to go." 

"Yes it does," Jack corrected, and jerked a thumb at the looming neon cube. "Into that thing. The weak trickle this thing gives off by design isn't enough to push it into other dimensions. But, all of the energy in one jolt might just do it." 

"And if it doesn't?" Bowen asked, frowning. 

Jack shoved his hands into his coat pockets and grinned. "Hope you weren't planning on finishing any long books." 

Anthony Bowen stared at him. Jack stared back. 

Bowen, as Jack would have predicted, was the first one to break. He grunted, and gestured sharply to his team. "Do it," he ordered, brusquely. 

Allison and the other man, a fellow with a neck as thick as his thigh and a buzz cut, bent over the bomb and with quick, skilful motions, tapped keys, tugged out wires, and removed bits of circuitry until Allison glanced up and nodded quickly, "It's ready, sir." 

"Do it, then drop it less then a meter from the cube and get clear." Jack ordered. 

Allison looked towards Bowen for confirmation, and he nodded. She pressed her lips together tightly, and removed the last component. Then, in one smooth motion, she and her gorilla colleague picked up the fusion cell between them and rushed it over to the cube, setting it gingerly into place before fleeing even more rapidly back towards the door. 

For a moment, nothing happened. 

And then everything happened at once. 

A hum was growing inside the fusion cell, and as the moments passed, the Goons were becoming increasingly nervous, exchanging glances and fingering their weapons. Jack stood firm, projecting confidence. If he wavered now, they'd probably shoot him before anything had a chance to work. Then the cube started making a sound. It was almost a hum, but half a screech, and sounded in counterpoint to the humming of the power cell. There was a spark, little more than a small snap of light that one could easily dismiss as being the product of imagination. 

Then it was a larger spark, a bolt of lightning that leapt away from the fusion cell to slap at the cube's surface. Then the energy started flowing in great arcs of light that leapt the distance between the cell and the cube. Something was shrieking discordantly, forcing Jack to clap his hands over his ears even as he squinted against the glare of the light. It might have been the cube that made the noise, but all he knew was that it set every nerve on edge, and the smell of ozone made him want to sneeze. 

The fusion cell was dumping its energy freely now. Jack briefly wondered what he would be like to be caught in a fusion cell explosion. He'd managed to walk away from several other sorts of explosions over the years, and in his darker moments he thought about making up bingo cards. 

Then the cube just folded in on itself. Beyond the intensity of the energy arcs, he could see it becoming distorted, _twisting_ sideways and crumpling. Then it was gone. The fusion cell, depleted, went dark. All Jack could see for several moments was the lurid after-images of the cube burned onto his retinas. He blinked rapidly, until he could see enough to know that the cube was gone and the cavernous room was, indeed, empty. 

He looked at the vacant space with satisfaction. "I love it when things work out for the best." 

From behind him came the sound of six rifles being simultaneously cocked. He froze and, ever so slowly, raised his hands in surrender, turning as he did so. The Goons had all taken up their arms once again, barrels aimed unswervingly at his chest. The three that he had sent out to secure the road had clearly done no such thing. He imagined that they had simply lingered in the corridors outside the cube room until the time was right. 

He looked between them. "Well, now, that's just unfriendly, Anthony." 

Bowen didn't look very amused. 

"I'm surprised you bothered helping me." 

Bowen didn't shrug. It would have thrown off his aim. The sound of it was, however, thick in his voice. "You were the only one with the technical expertise to solve our problem here. Director Hartman ordered us to assist you in any way possible. She also asked us to give you a message, once we were done." 

"I'm probably going to regret asking this," Jack said, "But what message might that be?" 

The last thought he had before the rifle fire knocked him to the floor, killing him almost instantly, was that he really should have known better than to ask. 

** 

Torchwood's interrogation suites were cold, sterile, white, and far too bright for comfort. Ianto had seen them many times, behind the fake wall, watching and listening and taking notes. He wondered who was looking at him now, wondered if they knew him. They had taken away his clothes, had him stripped by security staff whose faces he didn't recognise, and whose uniforms marked them as the little seen and much dreaded Internal Security division. They had scanned him, forced him into thin and inadequate scrubs before bringing him here, and putting him in a chair so like the one that Ianto had seen Jack Harkness in not too long ago. 

The difference with this chair was the restraints at the wrists and ankles. There was, Ianto had just had time to see before they had sat him down, another clasp for a collar about the neck. He was ridiculously thankful that they hadn't seen the need to use it. His thoughts were already scrambled with fear, rumours and whispers about what happened to people caught betraying the Institute running through his mind over and over again. If they had wrapped something around his throat, forced him to stare at that strange off-white stain on the wall opposite, he might have started crying. 

As it was, he could barely restrain the impulse to sob. 

He wasn't sure how long he was kept there, waiting in the cold. He lost all track of time and then, suddenly, the door swung up, and Yvonne Hartman strode in. Dressed smartly in her usual suits, he would have thought she was on her way to a business meeting. Instead, with a bright smile on her face that showed her teeth to excellent effect, she sat down opposite him, and dropped the items she had been holding onto the table. 

It was the phone he'd been using to contact Captain Harkness, the needler probe he'd used to get into the secure storage area, and the memory card with the record of Yvonne's 'private' interrogation on it. 

Ianto briefly wondered what they would tell Lisa, when they explained that her boyfriend wasn't coming back. 

"You've been quite the busy little bee," Yvonne said, leaning forward and smiling conspiratorially. "When you put your mind to something, you certainly don't hold back, do you?" 

Ianto would have liked to pretend that his lack of a response was due to some deep well of fortitude that allowed him to resist her questioning. In truth, he was too terrified to make a sound. 

"The question is," Yvonne said, leaning back, crossing her legs and folding her hands neatly in her lap, "What exactly are we going to do with you, Ianto Jones?" 

Ianto looked down at the restraints encasing his wrists, and his vision swam with unshed tears. 

** 

Yvonne had apparently decided not to punctuate her message by having Jack's body thrown in the Thames. When he came to in the middle of council tip, however, he wasn't sure that he wouldn't have preferred the river. He clambered to his feet, shaking himself free of several objects that he had no wish to identify, and ruefully examined the tattered remains of his waistcoat. The Goons had very obligingly put all their rounds nearly directly into his heart, and only a few had gone straight through his chest to tear the back of his coat. He could feel a grinding sensation in his chest and had the distinct impression that he'd be coughing up bits of bullet for a while, if they didn't shred an artery in the meantime and kill him again. 

He fumbled through his pockets and found nothing but a one-way train ticket to Cardiff. He still had his gun, but the ammunition was missing. He picked his way through a pile of used and discarded nappies, stumbled past several shocked council workers, and found a payphone. He called the Hub, and reversed the charges. 

"Did you find out who was sending those messages?" he asked, after he had fended off Suzie's panicked questions about what had been going on and where was he and why had he completely fallen off their radar and...? "Stop fussing, Suze. What did Tosh find out?" 

"Um..." Tosh spoke up, her voice soft, as it always was when she was unsure of herself, "I'm sorry, Jack. I was very close to unscrambling the signal, then it completely vanished off the grid. I couldn't find it again." 

Jack fought the urge to sigh audibly. It wasn't the answer he'd been looking for. Either his informant had been the one to set Yvonne's dogs on him, or he'd been caught in the act of helping Jack. For the sake of whoever it was, Jack rather hoped they were the former rather than the latter. 

"It's okay, Toshiko," he assured her, "You tried. And I know you. If you can't find out the info, no one can." 

She said nothing, but he imagined her blushing at the praise and smiled to himself. 

"Apparently," he told them, "I have a ticket for the next train out of Paddington to Cardiff Central. I should be back in about three or four hours." The ticket might as well have been stamped 'now piss off, or next time we won't just shoot you'. Jack, in spite of what ex-lovers had frequently said, was perfectly willing to take a hint. 

"Did you get things sorted in London?" Owen asked, "Did you find out what was happening to those people?" 

Jack frowned, stared towards the city centre. He couldn't see the Asen Industries building. The view was blocked. "No," he said, "I know what caused it, but I don't know why. Not sure we ever will find out. But it's not going to happen again." 

"That's the important thing, right?" Suzie asked, "That people are safe? That's all that matters, isn't it?" 

"Of course it is," Jack told her. "Nothing else matters." 

He hung up, stuck his hands in his pockets, and started the long walk to the train station. 

Several miles away, a demolitions crew moved in, bearing orders signed by council officials and with a company name that no one had ever heard of before, and began demolishing the Asen Industries building floor by floor. By the time the sun set at the end of the day, there was nothing left. 

\- End - 


End file.
